WEBVTT

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Happy New Year, everybody.

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End of one year, beginning of the next.

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Sort of traditional to review the top stories, right?

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So let's do that in today's update:

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The Top Five Geological Stories

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of Yellowstone National Park for 2024.

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Here we go.

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Number five. Is Yellowstone heating up or cooling down?

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There were some interesting changes in 2024.

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We had Abyss Pool in West Thumb Geyser Basin

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that increased in temperature,

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got a little bit more blue,

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Economic Geyser near Old Faithful

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erupted for the first time in 25 years,

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and there was a new feature

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that formed between Roaring Mountain

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and Norris Geyser Basin, just north of Nymph Lake,

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put a great big steam plume into the sky.

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This is kind of Yellowstone being Yellowstone.

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It does this all the time.

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When we look at overall changes,

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it wasn't heating up or cooling down.

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We know this from looking at river chemistry.

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That tells us something

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about the hydrothermal input to the river system.

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We can also look at satellite data of the entire region.

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Thermal output from satellites

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tells us that it really hasn't changed,

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so not really heating up or cooling down,

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but always interesting changes in Yellowstone.

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Number four,

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speaking of cooling off, Steamboat Geyser.

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Now this is the tallest geyser in the world,

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in Norris Geyser Basin,

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and when it erupts, it puts on a show.

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It can sometimes go years, even decades, without erupting.

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But in 2018 it sprang to life and began erupting repeatedly.

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And in fact, in 2019 and 2020,

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each year it erupted 48 times.

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Since then, it's been in a bit of decline.

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And this past year, 2024, just six eruptions.

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So it may be that Steamboat is going back to sleep.

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(shutters clicking)

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Number three, seismicity and ground deformation,

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what's that been doing?

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It's been pretty remarkably unremarkable.

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Over the course of 2024,

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we located about 1,150 earthquakes

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in the Yellowstone region.

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This is sort of on the low end for the region.

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Usually we see maybe 1,500 to 2,500 earthquakes.

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Sometimes it can be well over 3,000.

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Other times though, it's around 1,000 or so events a year.

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This doesn't mean it's the calm before the storm

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or we're overdue or something like that.

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It's just the way Yellowstone works. It was a quiet year.

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The same is true of ground deformation.

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Since 2015, Yellowstone Caldera has been subsiding.

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It's interrupted in the summer months

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due to some changes in groundwater conditions and snow melt,

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but overall, there's been a subsidence

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of about an inch or so per year.

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That didn't change in 2014 either.

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So ground deformation has been pretty steady

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for about the past decade or so.

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Number two, the first kaboom.

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This happened on April 15th in the Norris Geyser Basin,

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and it was the first

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instrumentally recorded hydrothermal explosion

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in the history of Yellowstone National Park.

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Now the park was closed at the time,

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so even though this only occurred

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about 150 feet from a boardwalk,

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no one saw it, but we heard it.

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A new monitoring sensor was installed in 2023

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in Norris Geyser Basin.

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It included some acoustic equipment

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that was able to detect the explosion

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based on the sound it made

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and actually how the sound managed to shake the ground.

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So we used this to pinpoint the location of that event,

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and sure enough, there's a crater

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right where the event originated from.

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So the first hydrothermal explosion

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detected solely by instruments in Yellowstone's history.

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Well, that brings us to number one.

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You know what it's gonna be.

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The big kaboom.

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July 23rd, Biscuit Basin, when Black Diamond Pool

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experienced the best-observed hydrothermal explosion

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in the history of Yellowstone National Park.

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Now this explosion was driven

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by water flashing to steam in the shallow subsurface.

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And we know this because all the rocks that came out,

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gravels and sandstones, glacier material,

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exist only in the upper 100 or 200 feet below the surface.

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The explosion was initially directed

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away from the boardwalk, which gave people time to get away.

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So fortunately, there were no injuries.

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This sort of hydrothermal activity

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is pretty common in Yellowstone.

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There are explosions every year somewhere in the park,

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sometimes in winter, often in the back country

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where they're not observed.

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So we need to do a better job

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monitoring this sort of activity.

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That was the purpose of the installation

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of the new equipment at Norris,

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and we're gonna be expanding this network in 2025

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to the Biscuit Basin area.

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Well, there you have it, the top five geological stories

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in Yellowstone National Park for 2024.

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Now let's talk about geyser activity, deformation,

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and seismicity that occurred during the month of December.

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It was another quiet month in the Yellowstone region

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in terms of earthquakes.

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2024 ended with just 82 earthquakes

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located by the University of Utah

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during the month of December.

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The largest was a magnitude 2.7 event

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that was in the southwest part of the park,

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south of Old Faithful,

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that occurred in the middle of December.

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Earthquake activities was distributed throughout the region

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and there were no swarms during the month.

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Turning now to ground deformation,

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this is vertical deformation at the lake GPS site.

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It's on the Sour Creek Caldera

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on the east side of Yellowstone National Park.

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Each one of these blue dots is one day worth of data.

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The entire plot spans the past two years.

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Downward trends indicate subsidence

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and upward trends indicate uplift.

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This trend of overall subsidence

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has been going on since 2015.

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We're getting about three centimeters or so,

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an inch or a little bit more than that,

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per year of subsidence.

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It's interrupted in the summer months

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by this little bit of uplift

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that you see just for a few months every summer.

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That's caused by changes in groundwater conditions

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and snow melt conditions.

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That ended in late September this past year,

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and we have seen a small amount of subsidence

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of the caldera ever since.

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Finally, now looking at the world's tallest geyser,

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Steamboat Geyser, we did not have any major eruptions

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during the month of December,

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so there were six overall during 2024.

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That's the least number of major eruptions

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since the current period of activity began in 2018.

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Now this is temperature in the geyser's outflow channel.

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Things are right about freezing, no minor activity,

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and then in the middle of the month,

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we started getting more and more minor activity

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that are these temperature variations you see in the plot.

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So the fact that minor activity seems to be picking up

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might mean that we're in for another major eruption

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in the first few weeks of 2025.

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Well, that's the update for December of 2024

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and all of 2024.

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Hope you had a great year.

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Hope you will have an even better 2025.

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From the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory,

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stay safe, stay healthy, and happy New Year.

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Bye-bye.

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(warm music)