Beautiful Morning Glory pool located near Old Faithful.
There's a lot we can learn from pools like this,
including how both humans and past climate can influence Yellowstone's
hydrothermal system.
Now.
Morning Glory used to be a beautiful blue color.
Over time, that color changed because being near the road
that was the entrance to Old Faithful, people would stop
by and throw things in like coins and trash.
It lowered the temperature of the pool and allowed different
kinds of microbial communities to grow in the pool, changing
the color from that blue to the rainbow color that
we see today.
Morning Glory is also a place where you can find
travertine.
You may know a travertine is something that kitchen countertops
are made out of.
It is a hydrothermal form of limestone, kind of a
hydrothermal calcium carbonate mineral.
Now travertine is not forming anywhere in Yellowstone Caldera today.
It is forming outside the caldera, for example at Mammoth
Hot Springs, where it makes these beautiful big terraces.
The fact that travertine formed at one time, though, suggests
that climate might have been different.
And in fact, when we date the travertine at places
in the caldera, it corresponds to times when Yellowstone's area
had a much wetter climate.
So the hydrothermal system actually would respond to different climatic
conditions.
This is actually true also of times of drought, when
we have evidence that geysers like Old Faithful and Steve
would actually stopped erupting.
So we actually see really strong responses to Yellowstone's hydrothermal
system due to changes in climate when it gets wetter
or drier.
So that's the story of Morning Glory.
Now let's talk about earthquakes, ground deformation, and geyser activity
over the past month.
Well, once again, not a lot of seismicity to report
in the Yellowstone region.
The University of Utah seismograph stations located just 72 earthquakes
during the month of June.
The largest was a magnitude 2.5 that occurred on June
10th just to the north of Yellowstone Lake.
There is also a small swarm of about 29 events
that occurred between June 6th and 9th just to the
northeast of West Yellowstone Mt.
And it's part of that band where we see most
of the seismicity in the region that extends from Hebden
Lake into the central north part of Yellowstone National Park
near Norris Keyser Basin.
So background earthquake activity for the month of June.
Turning now to ground deformation.
This is vertical deformation at the lake GPS site, which
is on the east side of the caldera.
Each one of these blue dots is one day of
data.
Downward trends indicate substance, upward trends indicate uplift.
And this plot spans the last two years.
We have an overall trend of substance which has been
ongoing since 2015 and it's interrupted in the summer months
by a pause or even a little bit of uplift
caused by seasonal changes in snowmelt and groundwater.
And we haven't seen a lot of deformation over the
last months.
We may be starting to go into that summertime change
in deformation, but overall, no real changes in the patterns
of ground deformation in the Yellowstone region.
And finally looking at the tallest geyser in the world,
Steamboat Geyser that erupted at the end of May.
And as you can see from this plot of temperature,
and this is measuring the temperature in Steamboats outflow channel,
we were just getting daily temperature variations because the geyser
wasn't doing a whole lot.
Started in the middle of the month, we started seeing
more variability and that's a sign of minor eruptive activity.
So we're seeing more minor activity at Steamboat right now.
That suggests that we will culminate in another major eruption
perhaps sometime in the next few weeks.
Well, that's the monthly update from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
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Thanks for joining us and we will see you next
month.
Bye bye.