Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872, is the world’s first national park and a World Biosphere Reserve and Heritage Site. It is home to over 10,000 geothermal elements, including 300 geysers, and is one of the most geothermally active places on earth. The park contains a supervolcano with two major volcanoes, and minor volcanic events have occurred in the past. The last cataclysmic eruption occurred 640,000 years ago, but if nature follows its timetable, another eruption is due.
Established in 1872 by presidential decree, Yellowstone National Park became not only the first national park in the United States, but also the first in the world. Occupying a 63-by-54-mile (101 by 87 km) box of the northwesternmost corner of the state of Wyoming, it has since been declared by the United Nations as both a World Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site. It is one of the most geothermally active places on earth. A systematic geological survey of the area that began in the 1960s confirmed the presence of several Yellowstone volcanoes that collectively constitute a massive “supervolcano.”
There are over 10,000 geothermal elements within the park, more than the rest of the planet combined. Yellowstone’s geysers alone, numbering more than 300, account for 60% of the world’s known hot water jets. The most famous of these is the cone geyser called “Old Faithful” which sprays thousands of gallons (1,000 gallons = 3,785 liters) of boiling water and gas 130 feet (40 m) into the sky every 92 minutes from a low earth mound topped from a nozzle.
Geysers, boiling hot springs, gas-emitting fumaroles, and other features are created by fractures in the earth’s crust around the edges of Yellowstone’s volcanoes. Molten rock from deep within the earth pushes up the center of the volcano, inflating the earth into a dome. From this pressure and from the distension of the ground by the dome, fractures and vents develop around the margins. Despite some of their apparent violence, Yellowstone’s features are releasing tiny amounts of energy in relation to what’s growing more and more beneath the park.
Geologists have identified two major volcanoes in Yellowstone. One is near Old Faithful and the other is just north of Yellowstone Lake. Survey measurements at the latter site show that the land rose nearly 3 feet (0.9 m) from 1923 to 1985. From 2004 to 2008, scientists were alarmed by an 8-inch (20 cm) uplift, but the rate subsequently declined.
Some scientists are not so interested in the collapse of a central dome and the catastrophic eruption of one of Yellowstone’s volcanoes. However, minor volcanic events are still devastating on a human scale. Studies have identified over 20 large craters that have been produced in the last 14,000 years, some due to non-volcanic but rather explosive geothermal activity. Some areas of the park reveal geological evidence of repeated lava flows, although the most recent of these dates back 70,000 years.
About 2.1 million years ago, the entire Yellowstone area erupted in perhaps the largest volcanic eruption ever in earth’s history. The supervolcano was about 2,400 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount Washington state. St. Helena. It has happened again twice since then, in a span of 600,000 to 800,000 years. The last occurrence dates back to 640,000 years ago. If nature keeps to this timetable, the so-called Yellowstone caldera, a collapsed oval crater measuring 47 by 28 miles (76 by 45 km), is due to another cataclysmic eruption.
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