A volcano has opened up in a national park
A scientist was driving through the park when he saw smoke.
While most visitors associate it with roaming bison and the psychedelic colors of Grand Prismatic Spring, the majority of Yellowstone National Park is actually a supervolcano.
The geological term is used to refer to an area of land that either in the past has or has potential to produce a high-magnitude eruption of 1,000 cubic kilometres of volcanic material. The Yellowstone Plateau Volcanic Field spans stretches of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho that cover most but not all of the national park.
'A park ranger noticed a billowing stream column': report
While the most recent lava flow at Yellowstone took place more than 70,000 years ago, the park is home to over 10,000 hydrothermic features such as geysers, hot springs, and steam vents that periodically produce small-scale volcanic activity.
On March 17, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported that in the summer of 2024 its geologists discovered a new volcanic vent producing steam. The vent sits at the foot of lava flow and was measured to reach 171 degrees Fahrenheit (77 Celsius) temperature. It has continued billowing smoke for months since and is one of many others in the area.
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"While driving south from Mammoth Hot Springs towards Norris Geyser Basin early on Aug. 5 last summer, a park scientist noticed a billowing steam column through the trees and across a marshy expanse," Yellowstone National Park geologists Jefferson Hungerford and Kiernan Folz-Donahue wrote in a blog post.
The scientist enlisted other members of his team and verified that it is in fact new; there is also the chance that it is connected to activity that was observed on the other side of the lava flow in March 2003. Shutterstock
'One can run a line along the axis of the older area'
"This hydrothermal activity persists through this day but is much less energetic than when it first formed," Hungerford and Folz-Donahue write. "[...] One could run a line along the axis of the older active area and it would intersect the new feature. This line also follows the trend of faults that run from Norris Geyser Basin northward to Mammoth Hot Springs and beyond."
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The smoke blew for months but eventually billowed out when the weather turned cool. Despite all the volcanic features, Yellowstone remains a place of low volcanic risk because of the low concentration of its magma reserves and history of past explosions all being small. Any eruption would at most be felt as a small rumble.
But the geological history shows in many of the natural wonders that one can find across the park: the Old Faithful geyser, Mammoth hot springs and multiple small volcanic vents that one can come across on hikes and strolls at different times of the year.
"As fall began to turn into winter, the steam plume gradually disappeared," the scientists wrote further. "The feature remains active, but there is some water in the vent, decreasing the amount of steam that is released. Whether or not the strong plume returns in the summer of 2025 remains to be seen."
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