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Sasquatch Eruptions · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: So they could go remotely, tap in, download the video, and actually saw one of these quote unquote Sasquatch eruptions happen.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Were you uh were you in Yellowstone a year ago when this geyser erupted that we're gonna talk about today?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Or were you guys the hydrothermal explosion in Biscuit?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's right.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Were you there or were you?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so no, missed it by about 10 days, actually.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: You were there before or after?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was there uh before it happened, and then when it happened, I think I had just arrived in Iceland.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, interesting.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: So you were you were in hydrothermal country for about like a month and a half or something right there.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: It felt very close to home.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have this image in my head of this hydrothermal explosion going off, and Chris Bullheis scampering down the boardwalk, running towards the hydrothermal explosion while everybody else is running away from it.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: And Chris is like, I gotta go see it, and Jenny's like, no, don't go, Chris, and you're running towards it, and everybody else is running away.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, I I may truth be told, I I'd like to think that would be me, but I don't know.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: This really came out of nowhere.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, you're just walk walking down the portal.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: You I mean, this thing is really close to the parking lot, so you you know you don't have really a lot of time to get acclimated to what's going on.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's right, that's right.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: You just all of a sudden this thing goes up.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, what we're talking about is uh it's it's the black diamond pool in the biscuit basin, the biscuit geyser basin, Yellowstone National Park, which is I mean, we have a whole audiobook series, our whole visual podcast series on our CamGio mobile app.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: First link in your show notes on Yellowstone.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: We cover all this stuff.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: We cover we go into gory detail about hydrothermal futures.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: We even have some pictures of a couple of the geysers, um, the hydrothermal explosions that we'll talk about this episode later on in the chat in that audiobook guide.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: But what we're talking about here is an eruption that happened on July 23rd, 2024, that sent mud, rocks, water up to 400 feet, 120 meters into the air.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: And there's videos on you on uh on YouTube or online you can find where people are really running away from this.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can kind of see this thing actually happening, and that closed the entire basin, Chris.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so, Chris, what what is this basin look like?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Can you describe this to us?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like what was closed?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: If you showed up in summer twenty five, what did it look like?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can't even get into the basin.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: The whole thing is closed off.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a small, it's a small geyser basin anyway.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: There is a there's a beautiful hot spring there.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let me interrupt, Chris.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: What is a geyser basin?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: For people who have not been to Yellowstone, describe what a geyser basic, like what does it look like when you pull up?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: This this is textbook when you think of geyser basins in Yellowstone National Park, where you you look around, all of the hills around you are lava flows.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's rhyolytic lava flows, tons of obsidian around there because that's that's how obsidian forms these really sticky, viscous lava flows.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and biscuit is like nestled at where these lava flows never quite came together.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you have a really a physical basin, mount hills around you, and there's a boardwalk going through, probably that's that's been made, you know, maybe several kind of loops that go through, and you look at different Kaisers, etc.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Hot springs, mud pots, etc.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the I think the big draw there is a beautiful hot spring called Sapphire Pool.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, aptly named.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's gorgeous.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, that's that's kind of the stage of what we're looking at.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: But you so you won't when you leave the parking lot, and which is a small parking lot, it's not a big basin at all.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Jesse, this is we're talking less than two miles away from old faithful.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, right, okay.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we're out of that.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so it's it's yeah, it seems to be like a stopping point.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like uh, hey, let's check this out real quick.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: People don't tend to stay long.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it's it's it's gorgeous though, Jesse, because the the fire hole river runs right at the right through and then you have these these pools.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: You have you know this black opal pool and you have black diamond pool right after you leave the parking lot.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then you walk a little further and you get to Sapphire Pool and you keep on going down the boardwalk and you get to these other little sputtering little geysers and hot springs and so on.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're just kind of like spitting constantly.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I love this area though, because it there's a there's a trail where the boardwalk ends, but it's a it's an established trail that takes you out to just some absolutely shockingly beautiful uh waterfalls, Mystic Falls.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, oh uh exactly.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: I remember this from uh going back a while now.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: But uh okay, so that's kind of what we're we're thinking.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a one of the smaller geyser bases, as you said, but the whole thing's closed down summer 2025 because this was a well what what the uh the geologists and the and the people monitoring these things in Yelston National Park termed Sasquatch eruptions, which were multiple eruptions on the showing up on their monitoring screens that they never really saw.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you got hints that they happened, that we know they happened, but never really saw what was actually going on.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thermal pulses in the in the temperature probes, etc.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so this was going on wet ground.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about those a second because I think they're fascinating.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: You had wet ground, you'd have um freshly sprayed rocks from these eruptions where it just kind of heaves them up in the air and they land a short distance away.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like you said, too, they had thermal probes and it would record these like spikes in temperature with a sudden drop in temperature then within a matter of like just a few minutes.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so they they never caught them, right?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And and so it's so perfectly named.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love that name squatchy ropes.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean Sasquatch, like hints of it through the woods, but you never actually put your finger on it, you know, don't actually know if it was happening.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a really cool story of the actual um I would you know discovery or documentation or visual identification of these eruptions actually happening and a kind of a cool scientific story that we're gonna get into here.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: But but Chris, so what happened with your students?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: You take you know, 20, what is it, 26 now, 28 high school students out west every year?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: 26, okay.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Out out west every year.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh you go to Yellowstone, you spend, I don't know, five, six days in Yellowstone, I think.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And what did you do?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Did this did this affect your travel plans at all or what you taught?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: It absolutely did.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, I was a little upset because I I was talking to one of my ranger friends there.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're okay.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Your routine is disturbed, Chris is upset.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's fair, but uh anyway, I was I was like, I want to get back and I want to see Biscuit.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want to see the I want to see what happened, I want to get back to Mystic Falls.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, why why do they still have it closed off?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, I didn't really have an idea as to how active it had been since July 23 of 24.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like I I didn't know that it was con these Sasquatch eruptions were going off.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously they can't they don't know what's going on with with Blackpool Diamond or Black Diamond Pool.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they so they're they're just safety reasons, they nobody's allowed back there.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um had to close it out.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was like really well published or I just maybe I just never came across it.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that's no, that's definitely super active.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really good point.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in a place like Yellowstone, if you don't have a pretty good idea of what's happening, you don't want people walking around because these things collapse.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of, you know, we'll talk about this briefly that this ground is unstable in many of these areas, and there's hor horrific stories in in all of these hydrothermal areas uh across the world, and especially in Yellowstone, just because of the high concentration of hydrothermal features.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you really gotta be really careful, exceptionally careful, um, until you understand exactly kind of what's going on here.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, so Chris, this was to kind of set the story here, you know, that happened uh mid-late July last year, uh 2024, summer 2024, closed everything down, and then in May, early May, when they could presumably get back into here and actually do some of this kind of field work, started putting up remote monitoring things and actually a webcam installed next to this black diamond pool, the one that erupted in July 2024.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And this has a long history of eruptions, this this pool, and we'll talk a little bit about that sort of the how these things ebb and flow.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: But like you said, there was a rock debris occurring, wet spots in the ground, came up with a great name Sasquatch eruptions, because we can't really put our finger on it, don't know what's happening, but there's clearly activity going on.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then on May 31, several people, including a citizen scientist.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I really appreciated this, Chris, because the citizen scientist thing is I mean, what what's that term mean to you, citizen scientist?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a hot term in in scientific communities, but and I'm sure you come across it all the time.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I do you know, I I come across it more in the astronomical field.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was just gonna say that.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: I agree, I I I totally agree with you.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's and I think astronomy is uh a scientific discipline that's ripe, that's really perfect for astronomy for uh citizen science activities because it's like they're just flipping through images looking for changes a bunch.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's something a lot of people, especially there's a there's a lot of astronomy uh interested nerds out there, frankly.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a nerd, so I could say that.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, there's a lot of people interested in this and they're willing to kind of go through that.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there's like exoplanets that have been discovered by citizen scientists.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know, the term is I could feel derogatory in some way, but it's just like not traditionally.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think so at all.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's like the the citizen science just means like people who are not traditionally trained are doing the work or or participating in the work at least.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: But their contributions have been amazing.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and I I'm I'm unbelievable.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Way more familiar in the astronomical field.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's so I think it's a great term, actually.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it's an I have a lot of respect.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: I have a great appreciation for it.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a citizen scientist who who helped observe, you know, kind of say, oh, wait, there's there's new rocks that have been displaced tonight.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and actually it happened in the last such and such hours so that the scientists could go and actually remotely download the video because these things kind of overwrite themselves, you know, trying to save storage space.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they could go remotely, tap in, download the video, and actually saw one of these quote unquote Sasquatch eruptions happen.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's an interesting thing, Jesse, is you know, they can't just live stream the camera that they've put up, the the webcam, because the Wi-Fi in Yellowstone is just it's notorious abysmal.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: We've experienced that first time many, many times.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Totally abysmal.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't have the ability to just live stream this thing, but but they it is recording video.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So when they get these kind of since May 14, when they installed this webcam, when they get this Sasquatch kind of activity where sensors are picking it up, temperature probes are picking it up, seismometers are picking it up, they can remotely uh download some of the the video for that time period, and that's what they did.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, on if if if you haven't already seen it, it's it's really cool to see.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, it's uh this B31 eruption just seemingly out of nowhere.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was no warning, there was no uh, you know, nothing going on, and then all of a sudden it just explodes.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's really cool.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think the data charts are interesting to look at too, these sort of temperature probes that are measuring the outflow from this black diamond pool.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um so there's a temperature probe sitting in there and it's constantly measuring temperature.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: You look at these charts, and over a 12 uh uh 24 hour period, one day, May 31, basically it's flat for a long time, right around 120 degrees, 130 degrees, slowly kind of creeps up a little bit by about 9 a.m.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Then it kind of starts to oscillate a bit hot, you know, going up and down, up and down between 130, 110 degrees, something like that, and then a big spike at 8 p.m.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Big spike up to about 146, 150 degrees Fahrenheit, that is, and then drops way back down to like 80 and then kind of climbs back up.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: So over the course of two hours, it did this big, this big spike, really quick spike over four minutes, then big drop down, and then recovered back to about 125 or something, which was kind of baseline, and that's the kind of signature of this hydrothermal explosion.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like I find that really cool.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: This flat line pulse hot, pulse cold, and then flat, and then then sort of back to baseline slowly.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really clear signature.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like an earthquake seismogram where you get a big pulse and then some some you know activity afterwards, right?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: You kind of have foreshocks, aftershocks, that kind of thing.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're seeing in the in the temperature profile of the the f the water flowing out of this thing.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's really um an interesting way to monitor these hydrothermal systems, I think.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think too, Jesse.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: The takeaway is that there's no indication at all that these explosions, because hydrothermal explosions are not an uncommon thing in Yellowstone.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: These are they're not triggered by magmatic processes or magmatic gases interacting with with shallower water.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is just simply hot groundwater.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Pressure is building due to steam and gas below the surface.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: When the pressure exceeds the strength of the rock or something shifts, it could be a minor earthquake causing a uh a change in pressure, and you get these no precursor explosions from these hydrothermal pools.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: A sound explosion actually, Jesse.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or you know, it'll create a new pool, and that's that's an interesting thing.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I think so.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh on that note, Chris, I just want to touch on that real quick and then pass it back to you to tell the story of this thing because I think this is a not an a well-appreciated feature, and we have a whole chapter really dedicated to this in our Yellowstone audiobook uh series.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: The ephemeral nature of these features, these hydrothermal features, they are changing all the time.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: We think of them, I mean, we like to think of them as very regular.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think Old Faithful has kind of painted a maybe a false template in everybody's mind for what these things should be like.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're really irregular and they blow themselves apart and they form themselves and they're changing constantly over kind of the the multi-year decade timescale.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So on this particular one, I don't know the history of this, this black diamond pool.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: You you'd mentioned something offline about the history of this.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: What is the the story here of this this pool that well blew itself apart recently?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we know that it it it came into existence due to an explosion or likely an explosion that created this pool, because that's usually how it starts.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: That it happened somewhere between 1902 and 1912.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason we know this very cool, yeah.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, see, I look at that and say, oh wow, that's not very old at all.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I don't know, just different perspectives, maybe, but yeah, fair enough.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, you're you're ancient, so that makes sense to me.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was around, I was just a young young boy at that time.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: We were teaching high school, it was not that point.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: But um, you know, that there were some early photographs, and then uh the scientists were in the area and they made no mention of Black Diamond Pool.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was actually nothing between where the parking lot is right now, or the fire hole river, where the there's nothing between the fire hole river and sapphire pool.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then in that time frame, there's a picture from 1912 where all of a sudden Black Diamond Pool is there, and it's it's really kind of straddled between the fire hole and sapphire pool.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how kind of how it came to be bracketed in that time frame, just based upon the the evidence.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it's so it's you know, old photos documenting kind of at some point in time, a Sasquatch eruption, maybe, actually created this pool.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then it's it's existed for a while, and then it it is the interpretation then that this most recent eruption, this 2024 eruption, you know, it it coughed and it cleared the throat, and then now it's changed the plumbing system in some way, shape, or form.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: So if you go back and it's open next year, will it look very different than it did in 2023 to you and your students?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think you know, if you're when you're in Yellowstone, you you you know kind of what to look for for these hydrothermal explosions, you know, Marie Bay, Indian Pond.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um these are not uncommon events, port chop geyser in in Norris Geyser Basin that we'll talk about in just a second.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can see the debris that they've coughed out, and that debris doesn't go away in that amount of time.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you see you can see the rocks that were thrown about, and you're like, oh, that makes sense.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Those rocks were ejected from that area right there, like that pool threw those out.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: It just violently coughed them out.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: These are big, these are big rocks.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like there, there's a reason you run away from these and you don't do a crystal as running towards these things because they're big.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these are these are even this event that was captured, the the one of the Sasquatch eruptions that was captured, it's fairly violent.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it you think hydrothermal it's really is an explosion eruption.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: It is a hydrothermal, it's more than a burp, right?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you kind of see waves going across the pool and and throwing this hot water around.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's more violent than I expected for you know a kind of a throat clearing exercise from a from a small pool, basically.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and there's really like it's interesting too, because what typically with some guys you just see some gurgling happen and you know, and then it will kind of pick up steam and build.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: This there was none of that.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: It just like phomp and it was it was gone.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I that's uh that's you know, that's a really good point.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: That that I'm used to, you know, all the times I was in Yellowstone as a kid and then with you, and and uh more recently again with you in in 2019, I think it was.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's a really good point.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't thought about that.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: You often see but the prelude to the geyser eruption is that gurgling, that bubbling, like there's there's stuff happening before, and then sometimes it happens and then it it doesn't actually erupt, and it was just a you know, false cue, but it rarely goes from flat calm to explosion, and that's kind of what this does in a sense.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very cool.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I would like to I would like to talk about like geologically, there's another there's a compelling piece of evidence that says this had nothing to do with magmatic processes.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: This was shallow, it was steam, and that is when you look at the kinds of rocks that were ejected, these were shallow rocks.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: There was no bedrock was coughed out of this.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: This was all glacial debris, it was silt stone, it was mudstones, and center and geyserite from right near the surface that that's you know, kind of lines all these pools.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: There was nothing deeper than that.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: No rhyolite from deep down was coughed out here.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's like another, you know, this was not a magmatic thing because I I think everybody can agree that that would be a much more concerning thing if we had magmatic, like related stuff happening.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely, definitely.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: So and I think that Chris, that brings up a really good point about the these hydrothermal plumbing systems.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it the natural way to think about these is that people often think, oh, okay, the magma is out gas, is like giving off water, or the water's coming into contact with the magma itself, and then it's kind of coming up.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that does occasionally happen.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it happens at a very small scale, but most of the water here, this is like groundwater that's circulating down and getting heated up just because there's a hot magma shallow.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like hitting magma in that way getting hot.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's the magma heats up the rock around it, and the groundwater circulates through that hot rock around it and then up.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: So there's not necessarily there's very it's very infrequent actually that there's a direct link between surface water and magma plumbing systems.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like those, there's they're connected by a big bunch of rock and water in between there that that it's not a direct line of plumbing down to the magma chamber.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't like dive down and follow this, you know, vent down and hit the magma chamber.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's not the way this works.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there's also like usually two layers of water.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: You have your fresh groundwater that then is getting heated by the by the salty brine groundwater below that.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you have this like that's a big buffer between what happens in the first 100 meters of the surface down to where the magma lies.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's there's a lot of you know, a lot of room there.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's right.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of good, that's a good buffering layer between these two systems.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so, Chris, you know, I think on the scale of Yellowstone activity, can we maybe move into to talking about some of the activity, the types of activity that occurs in Yellowstone?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, the sort of press releases we see all the time in the in the sort of science news stuff is all Yellowstone's gonna erupt, Yellowstone's getting more active, et cetera, et cetera.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And what they often are alluding to is the big eruptions, which there's been three in the last couple million years in the current location where Yellowstone is, and there's been many dozens over the last 17 million years going back over seven or eight different caldera hotspots, one of which is a lithium deposit, actually.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: But people, when they think of Yellowstone activity, they think of super volcano huge eruptions.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: But the vast majority of this really actually the the stuff we need to worry about as humans is probably the small stuff in a way, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, is that accurate to say, or the smaller, more frequent stuff?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the big super Yeah, I mean we can we can put some numbers on this in in a vague sense, you know, these small hydrothermal explosions that we're talking about that happened in the Biscuit Geyser Basin or Port Chop Geyser in 1989 and Norris Geyser Basin or even Excelser Geyser, which is right near the extremely beautiful Grand Prismatic Spring, which that that you know didn't happen until the the early 18th.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, those are all smaller hydrothermal explosions, and you're gonna have many of these per century.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So these are not uncommon.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Chris, what I I've I've forgotten now.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: I know we went through it when we put putting together uh the Yellowstone audiobook, but the big ones, the big eruptions that the big hydrothermal eruptions that are on the scale of like, you know, Mary Bay, those are those are different, far less frequent.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: In in your mind, are those in a completely different category?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, those were related, uh, you know, at least the ones that you just listed off, those were most likely formed during the breakup of the ice dams on the northern shore of you know, where Yellowstone Lake used to be, not where it is now, it used to extend further up into Hayden Valley and Pelican Valley.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: When those dams broke and the water rushed down the Yellowstone, creating the Yellowstone Grand Canyon, that sudden drop in pressure from the lowering of the water due to the ice dams breaking, those were related to those kinds of hydrothermal explosions.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so like Indian pond and I think it's I think it's important to kind of keep in mind that hydrothermal explosions, there's hydrothermal explosions, there's hydrothermal explosions, and there's all sorts of different categories.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: They have different processes.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the ones, the really big violent ones, historical ones, are I mean not historical, ones that are glacial times.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Those are different, totally different process than these relatively small kind of throat clearing plumbing system.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of think of this as these these ones we're talking about, the ones that you said um there's several to many percentury.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of think of these as like your plumbing system in your house needs kind of clearing out every once in a while, you know, you call roto root or something like that, or trees come in and dig it, dig you know, get into your your system going out to the road, and you got to clear that out.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's that kind of stuff that you gotta do a couple years or whatever, just kind of upkeep.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the big resetting events are are very different scale and a very different process, right?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, what other things happen in Yellowstone or that Yellowstone's known for?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can have strong earthquakes, those, you know, we said high hydrothermal explosions, many per century.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Strong earthquakes, we're talking about maybe one to a few or many during a century, and then let's get into the magmatic stuff.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: So lava flows with the we're talking about the non-violent rhyolytic lava flows, it's just really sticky stuff oozing to the surface.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Chris, these are far more common, non-violent compared to the big eruptions, but these are more violent than the earthquakes, more violent than the hydrothermal explosions.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like for human scale, these are still volcanic eruptions, but they're not like it'd be a very big deal.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it'd be it'd be a huge deal, but it's not, you know, planet-altering uh deal.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: But they are far more common than these big calderaforming eruptions.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: These you're gonna, you know, on average, maybe a hundred per million years.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, you got the big dogs, these caldera forming eruptions that that can change the game, change the climate, affect really everything.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like you said earlier, maybe one or two per one million years.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think that that just puts things in perspective a little bit.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: These are really rare kinds of things with the caldera forming eruptions.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hydrothermal explosions for Yellowstone, they're just not.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's right.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you're if you're if you're trying to find something to worry about, going to Yellowstone, you don't need to worry about the calderaforming eruptions.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: You'd much rather you you'd be much more uh better use your time worrying about a hydrothermal explosion as you're walking on the boardwalk, which is still an incredibly rare event, right?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's it's not gonna happen, but you know, that's something that's more um likely, if that's the the correct word here.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh 100%.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then, but this leads Jesse nicely into something that I you know when we first started kicking this around, hey, let's talk about this because there's some interesting geology with it.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then I started coming across my social media feeds, um, all these things about social media feed.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh here's your get ready, people.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're getting a window into Chris's social media feed here.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of stuff about tell me tell me what kind of tractor repair stuff is coming across your social media feed right now.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you have no idea, by the way, Jesse.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: I spent the weekend.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was gonna get all the stuff done.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: My truck broke down, my uh lawnmower broke down, and so none of the other stuff I wanted to have happen happened.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: I just ended up fixing stuff.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh frustrated and Jenny broke them all.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: So gosh, Jenny, just get it together.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: I know you need you need a guy to follow her around fixing stuff after she's gone around using it, don't you?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, all right.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um what was I gonna say now?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even remember that P brain lost track of what you're trying to say.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what was coming across my social media feed?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, all of the all of the animals are fleeing Yellowstone.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: This started somewhere in July, and it all it just kept coming and coming.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: I came across it when I was on the trip with my students.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: The animals started fleeing in July, or your social media feed you started seeing news things about or something about animals fleeing.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think both.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think both.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there was it was an article about this this really like uh you know made me scratch my head.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there was a a thing about a post about how hundreds of mountain lions are leaving, fleeing Yellowstone National Park.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm like, wait a minute, there are probably not hundreds of mountain lions that exist in Yellowstone.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I had to go look into that.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed, there's maybe like they think there's about 40 of them maybe in the greater Yellowstone area.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it's impossible for hundreds to leave to be fleeing.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: But Jesse, these things happen, I think, almost every time there is an event at Yellowstone, you know, with the okay, Black Diamond Pool explodes, and and and then there was the other headline too this summer.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: That did you come across this?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: That there was a a new uh pool that opened up in Norris Geyser Basin.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Did you see that?
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I I did not see that.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a small pool.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think it's I this is testing my memory a little bit, but I think it's like 10 feet across.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's really this kind of milky white or milky blue color, really pretty.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that you know what the headline was?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: New pool just suddenly shows up in Norris and shocks the scientists.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Shocks.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Shocks.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is unlikely anybody's any scientist is shocked by this, actually.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: No, okay.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, so he so uh a a quick back to the the uh the purported uh status of animals leaving Yellowstone.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: So Mike Polland, who we had on our podcast, an amazing science communicator, scientist in charge of Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, wrote a little article on his Yellowstone uh Caldera Chronicles um about this.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm cheers, I'm just gonna read you the intro line.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: The intro is quote Oh, you gotta here we go again.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh paragraph.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: The internet is abuzz with claims that animals are fleeing Yellowstone National Park and suggesting that bears, elk, and other creatures know something about Yellowstone's volcanic system that humans don't.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Hogwash.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: End quote.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: I love Mike Poland.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's just too good.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Here we go again.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Hogwash.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: That was great.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that was excellent.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, just one more thing on this.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: One more thing on this article.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: They've got a a couple a photo of a couple bison.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: The caption is these bison seem pretty relaxed.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: There's a bear, a picture of a grizzly bear.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: The caption is, hey mom, have you seen any volcanoes around here?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's dripping with sarcasm.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's totally chunk tongue in cheek.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's signal and you know exemplifies his uh lack of respect for these quote unquote news articles of fear-mongering about Yellowstone, I think.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um anyway, sorry, it's ridiculous.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um no, that's okay.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I was gonna say I remember back in 2003.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Norris guys are based, and we talked about this in our audio podcast series too, about these like weird things that were happening there.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and that that did the same thing.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: What was going on in Norris combined with a couple other things, like we found some new hydrothermal features in the bottom of Yellowstone Lake, and uh scientists gives an interview about these changes, and all of a sudden the BBC gets a hold of it, and we're gonna make a movie about Yellowstone, super eruption, a true story, it just hasn't happened yet.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's how the this this made-for-tv movie starts off, you know.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's and it's just uh it's ridiculous.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: But these these things they happen again and again and again whenever Yellowstone just does what it does.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's just like a perpetual motion machine.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean Yellowstone, I I think there's some aspect of it.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have to be a little bit, you know, glass half full here.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's some aspect of it that's encouraging that the geology of Yellowstone has such traction with the, you know, the the the sort of it's a little clickbaity, but it shows that it's fundamentally interesting to people.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's all just people like catastrophe.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's actually because it's interesting, it's such a cool, unique place that stories about it gain traction.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, they get spun up a little bit uh frequently, and it's very frustrating.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: I can't imagine being Mike Bollander, any of the scientists at in the at the USGS or any of the Yellowstone um scientists working there because you just have to deal with this all the time.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's a good sign, you know.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think people are interested in Yellowstone.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really unique.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: I have a different take.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, different take.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I I appreciate your take on it.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: It maybe tempers me a little bit, but when I job is just to temper you.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's all I do is just temper you.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: You need to do better.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's true, it's true.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my job, I think more than yours because I I get younger students, but uh, you know, the goal really is to all right, let's just be a little bit more critical about this.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or let's uh let's maybe take the time to put let's push pause.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take the time to look something up.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look at our source.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, where are we getting this information from?
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, is hey, if something sounds like BS, then your BS meter should be going off.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like you know, maybe I need to look into this a little bit more, you know.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um instead of just reposting or sharing or commenting on something, let's just push pause and let's calm down and and let's look.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't know.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: We have the world at our fingertips these days, and we tend to be a little lazy in in using that advantage.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: The world's not always ending.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: It it's gonna it's gonna be okay here.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know what?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: If Yellowstone decides to erupt, there's nothing we can do about it anyway.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, go there and watch.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Go there and watch.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Go there and watch the thing go off.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I think Chris, this is a really good example of uh the underappreciated um aspect of Yellowstone and Yellowstone geology, and when you're at Yellowstone, when you're walking around, appreciating the beauty, the unbelievable beauty of these hydrothermal features, it's underappreciated how ephemeral these are.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this is just a really good case study in describing that and showcasing that how much these things change, how frequently they change, and that these types of throat clearing, uh resetting events are really common.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: New pools open up, new basins open up, they kind of ebb and flow and then eventually die and they turn into different features.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's very natural.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of the process, that's part of the beauty of the system, really.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: Old Faithful is the is the rare one.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Old Faithful is not the type location for what a geyser looks like.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: That is a really rare system there because of the due to the regularity.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: Or the regularity is incredibly rare.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um shocking that it's still that way with all of the other seismic activity that surrounds the area.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: The you know, a shift can just at the snap of a finger, just shut that off and change everything and divert water away from old.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's amazing that it's amazing.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's still doing its thing.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I I think um we can appreciate the really regular ones even more because the because most of them are very irregular and and change a lot, and that's part of the the great stuff.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to Yellowstone uh many times in your life and see very different features um in the same locations.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's a great part.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: All right, well, Chris Sasquatch Eruptions.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good it's a good name.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good name.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: App description.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's very cool.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: A little bit of citizen science goes a long way here.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: Love that stuff.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: All right, you made it.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's a wrap.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: You can find all the all of our content, including Yellowstone National Parks visual podcast series on our Camp Fuel Mobile app.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: First link in your show notes.
• 35:07
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• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: We've got uh some listener questions episodes coming up or scheduled, so hit us up on the social medias if you have questions you want us to answer.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: You can also send us an email.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have a contest this link on our website, planetviewcan.com.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Cheers.