(soft music)
Hi, everybody.
I'm Mike Poland, the scientist in charge
at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory,
and I'm coming to you from Yellowstone National Park
for the June 1st, 2020, update.
Yellowstone's open, so it was a good chance for us
to come and do a little bit of fieldwork,
do a little bit of maintenance
on some of our monitoring stations.
But we were also fortunate enough
to catch an eruption of Steamboat Geyser.
Now, Steamboat just erupted on May 31st
at about 6:23 in the morning.
It erupts, though, with a water phase
that can be up to 300 or more feet high.
That lasts for tens of minutes.
And then, after the water phase,
you get a very vigorous steam phase,
and that's what we're seeing right now.
The steam phase might last actually
for just a couple of days,
and it's like a jet engine that gradually diminishes,
the geyser goes quiet, then it starts bubbling again
and will go into a new eruptive cycle.
So Steamboat's still as active as ever.
It's been doing this for about two years now.
Before we get to looking at the data over the past month,
I wanted to show you a couple other neat things
related to Steamboat, so follow me down the boardwalk
and we'll have a look.
This is Cistern Spring.
Now, what's really spectacular about Cistern
is that it seems connected to Steamboat Geyser.
In the day or two following a Steamboat eruption,
Cistern will start to drain.
It's actually started to drain already.
And, in another day or so,
this is basically gonna be a dry spring.
And then, over the ensuing days, it'll come back.
So there's actually a deep connection here
between Steamboat and Cistern,
where the water that fills Cistern seems to somehow
get sucked into the Steamboat system after eruptions.
Pretty spectacular.
All right, so let's go check one other thing
that I wanna show you related to these Steamboat eruptions.
Just follow me down the boardwalk.
When Steamboat erupts, all that water has to go somewhere.
In fact, it flows down this channel,
and right across this bridge,
you can see the water was so intense
that it actually piled up debris on this bridge right here.
Now, we actually have a temperature sensor
that's in this channel right here as well.
Some of you may have been to the YVO website
and looked at the temperature data
that indicates when Steamboat erupts.
When that water comes down the channel,
our temperature sensor that's in the channel
gets a high temperature reading.
And so this is where that temperature sensor is
whenever you're looking at Steamboat eruption data
on the Norris temperature logs.
All right, well, pretty cool
having this Steamboat eruption May 31st.
Really neat to be able to catch it.
Well, now, let's dive in
and talk about what happened in Yellowstone
during the month of May.
Well, let's start by talking about activity
at Steamboat Geyser.
This is the temperature record from the sensor
that's in the runoff channel for Steamboat.
Now, initially in the month,
it recorded just minor variations.
That's just air temperature because the geyser was dry.
And then there's increasing minor eruptive activity
that culminates in a major eruption.
You can see the increasing temperatures
through that minor activity.
Now, this cycle repeated itself five times,
culminating in major eruptions on May 8th, May 14th,
May 19th, May 23rd, and finally May 31st.
So Steamboat remains just as active as ever.
In terms of earthquakes, there were 288 quakes
located by the University of Utah Seismograph Stations.
The largest was a magnitude 3.1 on May 29th
just five miles to the west of Norris Junction.
In fact, there were three earthquake swarms
that occurred in this area during the month.
The first was May 4th to the 5th
when 12 events were located,
39 events were located between May 22nd and 23rd,
and, on May 29th to the 30th, there were 100 events
that were located in this area.
And there was a fourth swarm that occurred
just to the north of West Yellowstone.
That occurred May 9th to the 11th
and involved 80 located events.
This is pretty average seismicity for the Yellowstone region
where most seismicity occurs in swarms.
And, if we zoom out a bit, we can see that regional activity
is continuing in Idaho and also in the Salt Lake City area.
These are related to the tectonic earthquakes
that occurred in March,
and these are not related to the Yellowstone system.
Finally, let's turn to deformation.
This is the vertical deformation
of the White Lake GPS station,
which is located on the Sour Creek resurgent dome,
over the past two years.
It's a vertical deformation, and each dot is a daily measure
of the vertical position.
Downward trends mean subsidence and upward mean uplift.
You can see, over this two years,
the trends have been pretty standard,
pretty consistent subsidence
of about two to three centimeters per year.
The same is true if we look at a site
near Old Faithful on the Mallard Lake resurgent dome.
Again, over the past two years,
the trend has been subsidence
of just a couple of centimeters per year.
Finally, we go to the Norris Geyser Basin area
where deformation has been a little bit more variable
over the last couple of years.
We can see uplift in late 2018,
and then not a whole lot happening in 2019,
subsidence at the end of 2019,
and, since the beginning of 2020,
there's basically been no net deformation,
nothing really changing in the Norris area.
So deformation patterns that we've been seeing
over the past several months
are continuing (soft music)
throughout May 2020.
Well, that does it for the June 1st, 2020, update
for the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
Remember, if you have any questions, you can email us
at yvowebteam, that's all one word, @usgs.gov.
Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you in July.
Take care.