Cool Place of the Week #6 -Yellowstone National Park

The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. Photo taken by Takeya Meggett. 

Yellowstone National Park, located in northwestern Wyoming and parts of Idaho and Montana, is chock full of awesome things to see- waterfalls, a petrified forest, mountains, and diverse wildlife, to name a few. What makes it so unique is its location above a mantle hotspot supervolcano (the supervolcano gets its own blog post). As a result, there are a plethora of interesting geothermal features:  hot springs, geysers, fumaroles and mud pots. In fact, 2/3 of the geysers in the world are found in Yellowstone NP!  Even I'm not familiar with the differences between all of these geothermal features, so here is a breakdown, according to the National Park Service and this site:


Hot Springs  are where groundwater heated by geothermal energy emerges from the Earth's surface, They can have brilliant colors based on what minerals are dissolved in the water.

Grand Prismatic Spring is the largest hot spring in the US. The coloration is due to the  water itself (the blues) and pigmented bacteria in microbial mats around the edges (the other colors).

Bacterial mats of Grand Prismatic Spring. Photo taken by Takeya Meggett.

Geysers are hot springs that build up enough pressure to expel super-heated water into the air.

Old Faithful Geyser. Photo taken by Takeya Meggett.

Fumaroles, or steam vents, do not have as much water as hot springs and geysers. The water that is available turned to steam when it comes into contact with hot rocks underground. There is often a loud hiss  associated with fumaroles as the steam rushes up through the crack in the rock and out of the vent.

Black Growler Steam Vent (Fumarole)

Mudpots are formed when nearby rocks has been dissolved by groundwater and steam rises through the  groundwater.

Mud Volcano is one of the mud pots at Yellowstone. There is usually more mud, but it was cold and dry when this photo was taken, so the cracks formed. Photo taken by Takeya Meggett.

P.S.: A big thank you to my friend and colleague, Takeya, for sharing her wonderful photos with me! She is currently living out in Wyoming, working for Grand Teton National Park as an Interpretive Naturalist. I am really jealous!

An Update On The El Hierro Volcano

This satellite image from NASA shows the island of El Hierro. The white clouds are not from a volcanic eruption- they are regular clouds. The lighter blue swirl off of the southern coast is due to the underwater volcanic emissions.

A few weeks ago, my "Cool Place Of The Week" post talked about the volcano erupting off the coast of El Hierro, which is part of the Canary Islands. I saw a tweet from @NASA today with an update on the eruption.

The underwater eruption has not broken the surface of the ocean, and in recent weeks, carbon dioxide emissions have been subsiding, indicating that the eruption is winding down.

Darn! I was hoping for a new island to form! Maybe the eruption will pick up again in the future.

Here is a link to the original article from NASA.

Cool Place of the Week #4- The Canary Islands

The Canary Islands, though part of the continent of Africa, are actually part of Spain. There are two interesting things going on in the Canary Islands that make them notable.

There is currently an underwater volcanic eruption happening off the coast of the island of El Hierro. Scientists believe that the lava spewing out from the volcano will sooner or later break the surface of the ocean, and form a new island. Click here for an excellent article (with lots of awesome pictures!).

The other interesting thing about the Canary Islands is that they have the potential to create a giant super-tsunami. If the side of the volcano on the island of La Palma were to collapse into the ocean (it's already showing signs of instability), the volume of water displaced could create a huge tsunami hundreds of feet high. Even better (not) this potential tsunami would hit the east coast of the US. Click here for the scientific paper published on the model predictions.