It was early June 1994, we were staying in the Lodge at Yellowstone. Dad and I got up early one morning, the sun was just about to crest over the rise, and we got a personal show from Old Faithful. No one else around (that I remember seeing...). I'll remember that moment forever-
Got to watch Old Faithful several years ago on the last day the park was open in November. There were about as many people watching as with you. Really nice to drive through when there aren't many people. Went to West Yellowstone 21st October last year and was surprised by the number of people. We had planned on going into the park but headed back home the next morning because it was starting to snow. We are only a few hours north in Montana.
My biggest surprise the first time I visited Yellowstone is that there are many places outside the park boundaries, literally alongside the road and on someones private property that you can see small little steaming vents, or at least steaming ground. I came in the northwest corner that time, near Gardiner.
Hey Shawn thanks so much for visiting my home state and highlighting Old faithful! I was so glad you caught the eruption in the winter time! Imagine being the first people crossing this land and seeing that for the first time! Thanks again for all your hard work to provide great content!!!😊
Back in younger years, family vacations were in Yellowstone. Never ran out of places to see and things to do .... Awesome times .... Thank You for the videos ....
Would love to see a similar presentation regarding the numerous hot springs of south central Idaho, Shawn. I have to assume that the geological conditions are much different. Thanks for braving the cold for all of us.
You have certainly figured out how to beat the crowds, just go in the died of winter. Thanks for being the one standing out in the cold (and not me) capturing this eruption in winter.
Thanks Shawn for your interesting explanation on the particular geology there. Surprised to know about the early 500,000 yr old rhyolite basement under the glacial gravels also about the crystalized magma below. There are many sensationalists about saying that Yellowstone is a super volcano on the point of erupting any time now. Lovely to see Old Faithful on a lack n white snowy morning. Great video.
Mr. Willsey, did you notice the gnarly flood sediments just south of Yankee Jim Canyon? Also, is the ground between Gardiner and Mammoth so hummocky because of landslides? I'm talking about the area just to the west (I think) of the North Entrance station. It's pretty much the area where the new Mammoth road now runs. I just moved up to Gardiner from Wyoming to be with my special lady-friend. We live across the river from Devil's Slide, and it's a really rad spot.
Never been there because of the crowds. I watched Yosemite turn into a crowded place too back in the 1970s and now you get packed into buses to visit the Valley.
Cool video Shawn! I’ve been there a few times, while touring on my MC. Yes, it was very crowded each time. We did the Ring of Fire tour one year. I highly recommend it to anyone who is visiting for the first time.
*PILGRIMAGES* In the late 1950s my parents took my older brother and I on a 3-week trip from California up to Yellowstone and back including stops at Yosemite, Crater Lake, Port Angeles, etc. We spent an afternoon on this very spot. In the 1990s my wife and I took our two young daughters on a plane ride from Pennsylvania to Salt Lake City. We completed a somewhat different loop through Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado. Again lots of national park stops but the highlight, again, was Old Faith Geyser. I like to think that our trip inspired some later career choices as one is now a hydrologist with the USGS and the other has a Phd in marine biology. Shawn, thanks for triggering some great memories.
Shawn, love and follow your informative channel. Obvious from other recent videos you have an issue with runny nose…consider ipratropium bromide nasal spray which will stop the drip. Safe, effective, generic. I know from experience. 9:57
Thx for the excellent video. Was there abt 60 yrs ago. Clearly remember having a Nightmare that my Dad was too close n I was yelling at him to get back b4 it blew up. Scary when you are really young. Thx Sir Willsey. ✌
you rock Shawn- I love Yellowstone- there is an App for the Old Faithful erupting- I super like Big Hole- where all the water for the Henrys for comes out of the ground
Roads are all closed. Only options are a commercial snowmobile tour or a snowcoach. We took a snowcoach shuttle from west Yellowstone to Old Faithful and stayed at snow lodge.
Thanks, Shawn, that's fun and yes, virtually no one around is really rare! The chamber area below upper geyser basin isnt magma but crystals? Why?How might I visualize that better? Are there papers to read? Again, thank you!
Thanks for watching. Yes, its a magma that is largely crystallized so think of it like 'mush'. As such, it is not currently in a state where it is likely to erupt anytime soon. Here are some papers that might help: www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-surprising-amount-of-magma-is-under-yellowstones-supervolcano-180981229/ www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/yellowstones-magma-reservoir-comes-sharper-focus
Mush zones can be really hard to visualize but here's my attempt at paraphrasing the explanation that a volcanology professor gave me during my undergrad (and hopefully someone more qualified will correct me if I say anything wrong). The simple view of magma chambers as a region of completely liquid rock really doesn't work out because you need to get rocks absurdly hot to melt them 100%. This is because rocks are just a big collection of minerals with varying melting temps. Quartz for example starts melting around 600C, while other minerals may not begin melting until upwards of 1200C. 1200C is incredibly hot for upper crustal conditions like where the Yellowstone chamber hangs out, even with the hot spot beneath the area. So you can't melt all the minerals - but you can certainly melt some of them. The percentage of the rock that is melted is known as the melt fraction and depends on a huge variety of things - temperature, pressure, chemical composition of the rocks, etc. I would assume this is what Shawn is referring to by saying the magma is largely crystallized, is that it has a low percentage of the rock that's actually melted. If your melt fraction is super low, like 1%, then you'll have tiny little pockets of melt on a microscopic scale. Individual mineral grains begin melting from the outside in, so the edges of the mineral grains with low melting temps might be melted. But at a very low melt fraction, those pockets will still be surrounded by solid rock. It's only when you get a high enough melt fraction that those little pockets might begin to connect and form a network that allows the magma to move around at all. Think of water flowing through sand - most of the volume is taken up by solid material but there's enough space between the individual sand grains for water to flow. I think perhaps the sand analogy is best - a mush zone is like wet sand in a sense, except instead of water, the sand grains themselves are melting and acting as the liquid. Now the requirements for moving that magma around to a point that it will erupt, melt extraction, is INCREDIBLY complex and I know plenty of people who've spent their whole careers studying this and there's still a ton we don't know. I certainly don't understand it well enough to make a coherent comment about it. But the basic principle is that we need a high enough melt fraction to actually get our mush zone to a point that we can get magma erupting out of it. Estimating melt fraction is hard, and we (I say we because I am doing this for a project right now) can estimate it using seismic waves from earthquakes. Maybe the articles Shawn linked below can simplify it better than me, but in the most basic sense seismic waves travel at different speeds through different materials and by comparing the time difference between waves arriving at our instruments on the surface, we can build an image of what's underground. Melt tends to slow down waves, but certain types of waves are more affected than others. We can use this info to estimate melt fraction. However, that's really hard to do and papers come out all the time suggesting that we've been doing it all wrong, such as the second one Shawn linked. That paper said we've likely been underestimating the melt fraction beneath Yellowstone. That said, it's still not at a point where it's likely to erupt soon. I hope this helps, this took me an entire semester of university courses from a fantastic volcanologist to begin understanding how this stuff works so it's understandable if it makes your brain hurt!
Ivisited Yellowstone last winter. It was easily one of the coolest things I’ve seen, and I do a lot outdoors in the American west. It's so strange to be XC skiing on a board walk, and have steam and boiling water a couple feet away, and cross ice flows from the guiser steam that leaves ice on everything.
You mentioned the constriction causing the surface jet, but what are the physics of a geyser? My assumption is the weight of the water outweighs the pressure beneath it for a time, but eventually the steam or hotter water pushing from below overcome the weight of the water column above it. Is that a fair general assumption?
Yes, water is confined by its plumbing system and continues to be heated from below. Water exceeds boiling point (~198 F at this elevation) due to pressure of water above. Eventually, superheated water flashes to steam causing expansion which drives water upward to create geyser eruption.
Earthquake activities will wake up some dormant geysers . ie Steamboat geyser has been dormant for decades , last major seismic activity woke up Steamboat. Old Faithfull doesn't spew has high as it used to and its duration has gotten shorter with longer intervals between. You should check out the geysers along the shoreline of Yellowstone lake and note how the Northern end of the lake is rising, causing the water to shift submerging the land on the southern end of the lake. Which entrance did you use the enter the park ? not all are open in the winter. thanks , I live in the NW so I find all local geology fascinating .
West entrance. All roads in park are closed. Used a snowcoach shuttle to get us into Old Faithful where we stayed at Snow Lodge for two nights. Enjoyed several days of awesome XC skiing and geology.
One thing (of many) I have been curious about, is potential differences in the behavior of thermal features in relationship to available snowpack, and the impact of increased or decreased groundwater due to snow levels. Are there measurable indications or differences between years like this with heavy snowpack and the lean snowfall years? Thanks for what you do.
Enjoyed that. I learn something new with each of your videos. Curious. Any chance of stepping off onto the "wrong spot" out there in the snow or did they have the boardwalks cleared off pretty well?
3 degrees Celsius or 3 degrees Fahrenheit? I'm asking because you often use the metric system when describing phenomena in the field. Even if I conclude from the noise of the snow under your feet and the fact you gave the temperature of one area of the geyser in Fahrenheit first you meant Fahrenheit. ;-)
@@shawnwillsey I knew it was a stretch but it would have an effect according to the math but not measurable nor documentable. obviously you are aware that even at normal elevations from sea level to lets say 3,000 feet that cooking and boiling times change. but the change from sea level to lets say 6,000 feet thats a hell of a lot more than barometric changes? I would have to research it but I hope you do first.
Some geysers are effected by barometric pressure, Daisy geyser located not too far from old faithful sometimes has its intervals extended by 10-20 minutes due to thunderstorms or snow.
crystalized magma sounds good... no eruptions possible... there anyway... so the possibility of an eruption soon is unlikely?... because I've heard the span between the hotspot eruptions are about every 600,000 - 800,000 years... and the last one was 70,000 years ago?... also... all those rhyolite basalt layers are from the hotspot right?....
It was early June 1994, we were staying in the Lodge at Yellowstone. Dad and I got up early one morning, the sun was just about to crest over the rise, and we got a personal show from Old Faithful. No one else around (that I remember seeing...). I'll remember that moment forever-
Got to watch Old Faithful several years ago on the last day the park was open in November. There were about as many people watching as with you. Really nice to drive through when there aren't many people. Went to West Yellowstone 21st October last year and was surprised by the number of people. We had planned on going into the park but headed back home the next morning because it was starting to snow. We are only a few hours north in Montana.
The thing that I love when few people are around is the sound of the eruptions of these features.
My biggest surprise the first time I visited Yellowstone is that there are many places outside the park boundaries, literally alongside the road and on someones private property that you can see small little steaming vents, or at least steaming ground. I came in the northwest corner that time, near Gardiner.
Hey Shawn thanks so much for visiting my home state and highlighting Old faithful! I was so glad you caught the eruption in the winter time! Imagine being the first people crossing this land and seeing that for the first time! Thanks again for all your hard work to provide great content!!!😊
You bet. I love filming a few videos while I am traveling and adventuring. Win-win!
You're helpful in my guided tours in the park! Easy explanations which helps the 99.9% of the non geologist guest.
Back in younger years, family vacations were in Yellowstone. Never ran out of places to see and things to do .... Awesome times .... Thank You for the videos ....
Would love to see a similar presentation regarding the numerous hot springs of south central Idaho, Shawn. I have to assume that the geological conditions are much different. Thanks for braving the cold for all of us.
You have certainly figured out how to beat the crowds, just go in the died of winter. Thanks for being the one standing out in the cold (and not me) capturing this eruption in winter.
What a wonderful and calming tone you have. So matter of fact and down home. I really appreciate your work!
Thank you so much! I appreciate your continued viewership.
Great job on the cross section! Thank You!
Thank you so much ! the last time i was there was in 1969 as a teenager .
Please tell us more on your theory that the magma chamber is mostly crystallized. Great video TY!
So cool to see this today. Just made my camping reservations to border my YF geology field seminar at the end of June.
Thanks Shawn for your interesting explanation on the particular geology there. Surprised to know about the early 500,000 yr old rhyolite basement under the glacial gravels also about the crystalized magma below. There are many sensationalists about saying that Yellowstone is a super volcano on the point of erupting any time now. Lovely to see Old Faithful on a lack n white snowy morning. Great video.
Beautiful
Beautiful videography. Thanks for posting this.
Still on my bucket list. Hope to go someday.
Please do!
Mr. Willsey, did you notice the gnarly flood sediments just south of Yankee Jim Canyon? Also, is the ground between Gardiner and Mammoth so hummocky because of landslides? I'm talking about the area just to the west (I think) of the North Entrance station. It's pretty much the area where the new Mammoth road now runs. I just moved up to Gardiner from Wyoming to be with my special lady-friend. We live across the river from Devil's Slide, and it's a really rad spot.
I came in through the west entrance at West Yellowstone. I was in the Mammoth area last fall and did see the flood damage. Pretty incredible.
Never been there because of the crowds. I watched Yosemite turn into a crowded place too back in the 1970s and now you get packed into buses to visit the Valley.
Cool video Shawn! I’ve been there a few times, while touring on my MC. Yes, it was very crowded each time.
We did the Ring of Fire tour one year. I highly recommend it to anyone who is visiting for the first time.
*PILGRIMAGES* In the late 1950s my parents took my older brother and I on a 3-week trip from California up to Yellowstone and back including stops at Yosemite, Crater Lake, Port Angeles, etc. We spent an afternoon on this very spot.
In the 1990s my wife and I took our two young daughters on a plane ride from Pennsylvania to Salt Lake City. We completed a somewhat different loop through Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado. Again lots of national park stops but the highlight, again, was Old Faith Geyser. I like to think that our trip inspired some later career choices as one is now a hydrologist with the USGS and the other has a Phd in marine biology.
Shawn, thanks for triggering some great memories.
Thanks for the diagram
I saw it in summer and it was packed. The wind was blowing very hard and when it erupted it blew all the hot water sideways and there was a stampede.
Shawn, love and follow your informative channel. Obvious from other recent videos you have an issue with runny nose…consider ipratropium bromide nasal spray which will stop the drip. Safe, effective, generic. I know from experience. 9:57
Thank you so much!!
We were there 2 years ago in August surrounded by thousands of other humans!!
Thx for the excellent video. Was there abt 60 yrs ago. Clearly remember having a Nightmare that my Dad was too close n I was yelling at him to get back b4 it blew up. Scary when you are really young. Thx Sir Willsey. ✌
Thanks!
Thanks so much for your kind donation.
you rock Shawn- I love Yellowstone- there is an App for the Old Faithful erupting- I super like Big Hole- where all the water for the Henrys for comes out of the ground
Yes, we used the Geyser Times app/website when we were there.
How did you get there are the roads open? Did you snowmobile in?
My question too.
Roads are all closed. Only options are a commercial snowmobile tour or a snowcoach. We took a snowcoach shuttle from west Yellowstone to Old Faithful and stayed at snow lodge.
Thanks, Shawn, that's fun and yes, virtually no one around is really rare! The chamber area below upper geyser basin isnt magma but crystals? Why?How might I visualize that better? Are there papers to read? Again, thank you!
www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo
Thanks for watching. Yes, its a magma that is largely crystallized so think of it like 'mush'. As such, it is not currently in a state where it is likely to erupt anytime soon.
Here are some papers that might help: www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-surprising-amount-of-magma-is-under-yellowstones-supervolcano-180981229/
www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/yellowstones-magma-reservoir-comes-sharper-focus
Mush zones can be really hard to visualize but here's my attempt at paraphrasing the explanation that a volcanology professor gave me during my undergrad (and hopefully someone more qualified will correct me if I say anything wrong). The simple view of magma chambers as a region of completely liquid rock really doesn't work out because you need to get rocks absurdly hot to melt them 100%. This is because rocks are just a big collection of minerals with varying melting temps. Quartz for example starts melting around 600C, while other minerals may not begin melting until upwards of 1200C. 1200C is incredibly hot for upper crustal conditions like where the Yellowstone chamber hangs out, even with the hot spot beneath the area. So you can't melt all the minerals - but you can certainly melt some of them. The percentage of the rock that is melted is known as the melt fraction and depends on a huge variety of things - temperature, pressure, chemical composition of the rocks, etc. I would assume this is what Shawn is referring to by saying the magma is largely crystallized, is that it has a low percentage of the rock that's actually melted. If your melt fraction is super low, like 1%, then you'll have tiny little pockets of melt on a microscopic scale. Individual mineral grains begin melting from the outside in, so the edges of the mineral grains with low melting temps might be melted. But at a very low melt fraction, those pockets will still be surrounded by solid rock. It's only when you get a high enough melt fraction that those little pockets might begin to connect and form a network that allows the magma to move around at all. Think of water flowing through sand - most of the volume is taken up by solid material but there's enough space between the individual sand grains for water to flow. I think perhaps the sand analogy is best - a mush zone is like wet sand in a sense, except instead of water, the sand grains themselves are melting and acting as the liquid. Now the requirements for moving that magma around to a point that it will erupt, melt extraction, is INCREDIBLY complex and I know plenty of people who've spent their whole careers studying this and there's still a ton we don't know. I certainly don't understand it well enough to make a coherent comment about it. But the basic principle is that we need a high enough melt fraction to actually get our mush zone to a point that we can get magma erupting out of it. Estimating melt fraction is hard, and we (I say we because I am doing this for a project right now) can estimate it using seismic waves from earthquakes. Maybe the articles Shawn linked below can simplify it better than me, but in the most basic sense seismic waves travel at different speeds through different materials and by comparing the time difference between waves arriving at our instruments on the surface, we can build an image of what's underground. Melt tends to slow down waves, but certain types of waves are more affected than others. We can use this info to estimate melt fraction. However, that's really hard to do and papers come out all the time suggesting that we've been doing it all wrong, such as the second one Shawn linked. That paper said we've likely been underestimating the melt fraction beneath Yellowstone. That said, it's still not at a point where it's likely to erupt soon.
I hope this helps, this took me an entire semester of university courses from a fantastic volcanologist to begin understanding how this stuff works so it's understandable if it makes your brain hurt!
@@qwryzu Hard to read, constructive criticism, paragraphs are your friends I've been told.🙂
Ivisited Yellowstone last winter. It was easily one of the coolest things I’ve seen, and I do a lot outdoors in the American west. It's so strange to be XC skiing on a board walk, and have steam and boiling water a couple feet away, and cross ice flows from the guiser steam that leaves ice on everything.
You mentioned the constriction causing the surface jet, but what are the physics of a geyser? My assumption is the weight of the water outweighs the pressure beneath it for a time, but eventually the steam or hotter water pushing from below overcome the weight of the water column above it. Is that a fair general assumption?
Yes, water is confined by its plumbing system and continues to be heated from below. Water exceeds boiling point (~198 F at this elevation) due to pressure of water above. Eventually, superheated water flashes to steam causing expansion which drives water upward to create geyser eruption.
Earthquake activities will wake up some dormant geysers . ie Steamboat geyser has been dormant for decades , last major seismic activity woke up Steamboat. Old Faithfull doesn't spew has high as it used to and its duration has gotten shorter with longer intervals between. You should check out the geysers along the shoreline of Yellowstone lake and note how the Northern end of the lake is rising, causing the water to shift submerging the land on the southern end of the lake. Which entrance did you use the enter the park ? not all are open in the winter. thanks , I live in the NW so I find all local geology fascinating .
West entrance. All roads in park are closed. Used a snowcoach shuttle to get us into Old Faithful where we stayed at Snow Lodge for two nights. Enjoyed several days of awesome XC skiing and geology.
One thing (of many) I have been curious about, is potential differences in the behavior of thermal features in relationship to available snowpack, and the impact of increased or decreased groundwater due to snow levels. Are there measurable indications or differences between years like this with heavy snowpack and the lean snowfall years? Thanks for what you do.
Hot Cocoa Stipend!
Thanks so much for your kind donation. Much appreciated to warm me back up.
Enjoyed that. I learn something new with each of your videos.
Curious. Any chance of stepping off onto the "wrong spot" out there in the snow or did they have the boardwalks cleared off pretty well?
The elevated boardwalks are still there. Just covered in a few feet of snow, making them even more elevated. We often had a railing down by our feet.
Where’s the water coming from? Just ground water? Or is it venting water from the magma chamber far below?
3 degrees Celsius or 3 degrees Fahrenheit? I'm asking because you often use the metric system when describing phenomena in the field.
Even if I conclude from the noise of the snow under your feet and the fact you gave the temperature of one area of the geyser in Fahrenheit first you meant Fahrenheit. ;-)
Yes 3 degrees Fahrenheit. Should have been more specific.
I wonder if barometric pressure could affect a bit timing of eruptions.
I don't think it plays a factor as the pressure of superheated water flashing to steam in the confined plumbing system is so much greater.
@@shawnwillsey I knew it was a stretch but it would have an effect according to the math but not measurable nor documentable. obviously you are aware that even at normal elevations from sea level to lets say 3,000 feet that cooking and boiling times change. but the change from sea level to lets say 6,000 feet thats a hell of a lot more than barometric changes? I would have to research it but I hope you do first.
you are the youngest you have to do it
Some geysers are effected by barometric pressure, Daisy geyser located not too far from old faithful sometimes has its intervals extended by 10-20 minutes due to thunderstorms or snow.
Thanks for sharing the pro tip of WINTER visits to Yellowstone…so I don’t have to!🤣
I guess winter is really the best time to avoid the crowds lol...
For sure!
❤
0:48 3 Degrees ... F?
Yes 3 degrees Fahrenheit. Should have been more specific.
Crystalized lava, you say? Won't flow or erupt? Sounds like a giant plug to me. Boom!
As I get older
I don’t erupt as often as I did 50 years ago
And my plumbing leaks too
🤔hydrothermal or geothermal ?
Can you bring me back a t-shirt?
Sorry. I left on Sunday.
@@shawnwillsey oh gosh man i'm always just joshin'. Don't be taking people t-shirts....people should be taking you t-shirts
Please stop sniffling
What's the man supposed to do? It's almost zero outside and he was cross-country skiing. You wouldn't be in any better shape
crystalized magma sounds good... no eruptions possible... there anyway... so the possibility of an eruption soon is unlikely?... because I've heard the span between the hotspot eruptions are about every 600,000 - 800,000 years... and the last one was 70,000 years ago?... also... all those rhyolite basalt layers are from the hotspot right?....