The Yellowstone caldera, which lurks beneath the first-ever US national park, gets its chilling nickname as a supervolcano due to its ability to inflict devastation on a global level. Located below the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, the supervolcano is constantly monitored by the USGS (United States Geological Survey) for signs that a supereruption is on its way. One of the jobs of the government agency is to monitor the temperature of the geysers – vents in the Earth surface that eject hot water sea steam – inside Yellowstone National Park.
This includes one of the most popular tourist attractions – Steamboat Geyser – which can shoot water 100 metres into the air.
Yesterday, Mr Poland released a video on the USGS YouTube channel, where he updated viewers on activity over the last month.
He said: “I wanted to show you the temperature record in the Steamboat outflow channel.
“This is a thermometer basically that’s stuck in the channel that’s draining Steamboat.
“So whenever there are eruptions, the water will pass over this thermometer and then in the day they get radioed in and we can record it and show it in real-time on the website.
“So there were five water eruptions at Steamboat Geyser during the month of October, you can see them all right here in this plot.”
Mr Poland went on to discuss how there were five key events over the last month.
He said: “This is showing the temperature over the entire month.
“So, here’s an eruption on October 1, and you can see tight after the eruption the temperature went down and then we were seeing kind of daily temperature variations of just air temperature.
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“It’s kind of neat as well to see that sometimes minors only last for a couple of days, but sometimes they last for many days.
“There’s no pattern to how long that minor activity occurs before the big major eruption happens.
“But you can go online and see this on our website which is updated daily.”
The news comes after a researcher claimed NASA’s £2.7billion plan to cool the caldera could cause it to erupt.
Professor Simon Holland said in October: “There is evidence that the last time Yellowstone erupted that the ash went at least 3,000 miles to Nebraska and the amount of ash and lava and stuff that comes out goes into the atmosphere and can cause what’s known as nuclear winter, masking the Earth from sunlight.
“So JPL and NASA are planning to spend $3.5billion on cooling Yellowstone down, but it’s a big lake molten lava.
“They propose drilling down to the edges of the caldera, pumping cold water down and cooling down the big bubble of magma.
“Here’s the fact though – they would have to cool it down by 20 gigawatts – that’s a large number and it would take 16,000 years.”
Professor Holland went on to add his concerns that NASA’s plan could even cause a supereuption.
He continued: “Would it work? Probably not – it would be the world’s largest geothermal power station – but I don’t think it’s going to work.
“Plus this is a potential danger, by cooling down the edge, the peripheral of the caldera, it might crack, causing fissures and actually cause it to explode – not so good.
The volcano explodes about every 600,000 years, so the chances of it exploding in your lifetime are extremely low.
“If JPL, NASA and the US government decide to cool down the Yellowstone caldera, I just hope it doesn’t explode.”
