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Caldera Chronicles

Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

Caldera Chronicles

Filter Total Items: 364
The largest landslide in the world

The largest landslide in the world

Yellowstone is well-known as one of the largest volcanic systems in the world. Few people know, however, that the largest-known subaerial landslide on...

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The Changing Moods of Colloidal Pool in Norris Geyser Basin

The Changing Moods of Colloidal Pool in Norris Geyser Basin

Many of Yellowstone’s hot springs, geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles look different depending on the season, year, or sometimes even the day one visits...

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Exciting insights into Yellowstone’s youngest supereruption

Exciting insights into Yellowstone’s youngest supereruption

About 631,000 years ago, a massive eruption formed what today is known as Yellowstone Caldera. New deposits, discovered within the caldera, are...

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How do GPS stations monitoring Yellowstone measure such small movements?

How do GPS stations monitoring Yellowstone measure such small movements?

In Yellowstone, deformation of the ground surface can be measured to fractions of an inch.  Specialized methods of processing GPS data make it...

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How much heat is emitted by hydrothermal areas on the floor of Yellowstone Lake?

How much heat is emitted by hydrothermal areas on the floor of Yellowstone Lake?

Measuring the heat output of a hydrothermal area is not easy—Earth’s surface is often too noisy for accurate measurements to be made easily.  But the...

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Temperature Loggers Shed Light on Past and Future Yellowstone Geyser Activity

Temperature Loggers Shed Light on Past and Future Yellowstone Geyser Activity

Selected hydrothermal features at Yellowstone National Park have data loggers that capture geyser eruption times. A systematic analysis of these data...

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Henrys Fork Caldera: A glimpse into one possible future for Yellowstone

Henrys Fork Caldera: A glimpse into one possible future for Yellowstone

What will happen to Yellowstone once its rhyolite magma system shuts down? To understand the future, geologists look to the past—in this case, to...

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A step-by-step guide for accessing satellite images of Yellowstone

A step-by-step guide for accessing satellite images of Yellowstone


Have you ever wanted to get your own visible and thermal infrared satellite images of Yellowstone?  They are relatively easy to find and download...

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How and why do we collect sediment cores in Yellowstone Lake?

How and why do we collect sediment cores in Yellowstone Lake?

In August 2021, YVO scientists collected sediment cores from the floor of Yellowstone Lake. Analysis of the sediment composition, as well as the...

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Taking Yellowstone seismology to the classroom for some “deep learning”

Taking Yellowstone seismology to the classroom for some “deep learning”

Locating earthquakes in Yellowstone is a time-intensive process that requires the trained eye and extensive experience of a human analyst. But...

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Scientists can now “sniff” Yellowstone gases in real time

Scientists can now “sniff” Yellowstone gases in real time

Much is known about how the chemical compositions of gases vary across the Yellowstone volcanic system, but how they vary in time has remained largely...

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Silver Gate—the Mammoth Terraces of yesteryear!

Silver Gate—the Mammoth Terraces of yesteryear!

Just south of Mammoth Hot Springs, near the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park, lies a jumble of white/gray rock known as the Hoodoos or...

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Locating earthquakes in the Yellowstone region

Locating earthquakes in the Yellowstone region

Ever wonder how seismologists determine the location of an earthquake in Yellowstone?  It’s an intricate process, but thanks to experienced scientists...

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Volcano deformation: What and why?

Volcano deformation: What and why?

The ground surface at Yellowstone goes up and down.  Since 2015 the caldera has been going down at a rate of about 2–3 cm—about 1 inch—per year, but...

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Borehole instruments: The hidden component of geophysical monitoring in Yellowstone

Borehole instruments: The hidden component of geophysical monitoring in Yellowstone

When it comes to data, Yellowstone is a geophysicist’s dream. There is continuous activity from earthquakes, geysers, and of course, the volcano...

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Where is the volcano?

Where is the volcano?

Visitors to Yellowstone ask a lot of questions! So how do park rangers answer when they are asked, “where is the volcano?”

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Relics of past earthquakes: How the 1959 Hebgen Lake M7.3 earthquake may continue to influence Yellowstone seismicity today

Relics of past earthquakes: How the 1959 Hebgen Lake M7.3 earthquake may continue to influence Yellowstone seismicity today

The M7.3 Hebgen Lake earthquake in 1959 is one of the two the largest recorded earthquakes in the entire Intermountain West of the United States.  We...

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“Land of the burning ground”: The history and traditions of Indigenous people in Yellowstone

“Land of the burning ground”: The history and traditions of Indigenous people in Yellowstone

We sometimes think of Yellowstone as an untouched landscape, but humans have been present in the area for over ten thousand years!  The history and...

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Yellowstone’s sibling in the southern hemisphere: Taupō, New Zealand

Yellowstone’s sibling in the southern hemisphere: Taupō, New Zealand

Yellowstone is not the only large caldera system in the world.  Indeed, caldera systems can be found all over the planet!  In New Zealand, the Taupō...

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An outlier of Yellowstone's thermal areas: the travertine of Mammoth Hot Springs

An outlier of Yellowstone's thermal areas: the travertine of Mammoth Hot Springs

Early explorers during the separate Washburn, Hayden, and Hague expeditions of the 1870s were astonished by the massive terraces and pools of hot...

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The long journey of water from Yellowstone’s hot springs and geysers to different oceans

The long journey of water from Yellowstone’s hot springs and geysers to different oceans

Yellowstone’s hot spring waters ultimately flow for thousands of miles before entering the ocean. But waters enter two different oceans—the Gulf of...

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