Images

Sensor (left) and battery/electronics package (right) at vent location A in the Deep Hole area of Yellowstone Lake.  Photo was taken immediately before recovery from the lake floor. Notice the battery/electronics package slightly submerged in sediment.

Spectrogram and wind data from stations on Stevenson Island for June 30, 2018. Warm colors in the spectrogram correspond to stronger seismic energy compared to cool colors. The ~1-second-period lake-generated microseism (outlined by the black box) that was generated on this day is correlated with elevated wind speeds (red circles) as a storm passed by overnight.

River Styx, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. This thermal feature is actually a subterranean hot water creek that likely collects water discharged from Mammoth Hot Spring pools that, after cooling and outflowing from vents, tends to disappear back underground through the porous travertine.

View of Lower Geyser Basin, with Fountain and Clepsydra Geysers in eruption, looking south towards Fountain Paint Pots. The vegetation in the photo is indicative of vegetation throughout much of Lower Geyser Basin—open grassland maintained by hot ground with patches of lodgepole pine.

A nodal seismometer can be easily deployed for a month in a closely spaced array of tens of instruments. Arrays have been installed at Yellowstone National Park to map subsurface of geyser basins.

The head of an immature wetsalts tiger beetle at the entrance to the burrow it dug. Photo by Robert K. D. Peterson, 2017.

Time series of vertical displacements during April–October 2017 at four GPS stations (LAK1, LAK2, LKWY, and SEDG) on the north side of Yellowstone Lake. Downward trends indicate subsidence and upward trends show uplift. Uplift “spikes” in late September are related to inclement weather and do not show true deformation. Error bars are one standard deviation.

Map showing volcanoes that formed at the leading edge of the Yellowstone hotspot in the past several million years.  (A) Map of northwest Wyoming, eastern Idaho, and southern Montana (modified from Brueseke et al., 2017, https://doi.org/10.1130/GES01553.1).  Upper Wind River Basin (UWRB) is depicted by dashe

Grant Village boat dock, on the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, where a water-level sensor measures the level of the lake. Photo by David Mencin (EarthScope Consortium).

Photograph showing roadcut exposure of Huckleberry Ridge Tuff and Mesa Falls Tuff along U.S. Route 20 between Ashton and Island Park, Idaho. This exposure is approximately 60 feet high.

Example Hydrotherm output. Hydrotherm is a three-dimensional simulation of multiphase groundwater flow and heat transport in the temperature range of 0 to 1200 degrees Celsius and the pressure range of 1 to 1000 MPa.

Dr. Jacob Lowenstern, Scientist-in-Charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory during 2002-2017. In this photo, he's leading a field trip in Yellowstone National Park with a group of international volcanologists. 

Steam-driven vents on the floor of Yellowstone Lake in the Deep Hole, east of Stevenson Island. Image acquired by the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration ROV Yogi in August 2017.

Changes in snow conditions at a gravity station in Yellowstone National Park in 2017. Each photo is taken from about the same location in May, July, August, and October of that year. The red circle in the May photograph shows the location of the gravity station in this area, which is near Craig Pass, a few miles southeast of Old Faithful.

Map of gravity stations measured in 2017 in Yellowstone National Park. Yellow lines are roads, dashed line marks the caldera boundary, black line outlines Yellowstone National Park, green circles note resurgent domes, and red dots are gravity stations.

WorldView-2 natural-color satellite image from December 9, 2017, showing thermal areas as snow-free zones on the north side of Mallard Lake resurgent dome in Yellowstone National Park.

A blue glow is emitted by radiation during operation of the USGS TRIGA® Reactor, a low-power nuclear research reactor in Denver, Colorado. Photo by Christopher Farwell, October 27, 2017.

Sunset lake in Black Sand Basin of Yellowstone National Park

View of the Silver Gate landslide complex from Bunsen Peak in Yellowstone National Park.  The landslide originates from Terrace Mountain.

A weir constructed by Irving Friedman and Dan Norton to measure water discharge and to monitor changes in hydrothermal activity on a tributary flowing into Boundary Creek in southwest Yellowstone National Park. USGS photo by Shaul Hurwitz, September 17, 2017.

Focal mechanism determined by moment tensor analysis, which uses a model to fit the long-period (~10 s period or greater) ground motion records recorded at multiple locations.