[Rockhounds] Geophysicists Mapped the 'Plumbing' That Feeds Yellowstone's Famous Hot Springs

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

A team of geophysicists recently strung a large wire loop from a helicopter
and flew over Yellowstone National Park in order to see its hidden
underground networks. They managed to collect a trove of data that
highlighted electrical and magnetic properties of the water and earth under
the park, as well as how the hot springs are more interconnected than
previously thought.

Yellowstone is a 3,500-square-mile park that has numerous hot springs on
its surface, most famously Old Faithful
<https://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/exploreoldfaithful.htm>, one of the
park’s 500-odd geysers. But these researchers wanted to know more about how
the water underground was sourced and how interconnected the entire system
was. Their findings were published
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04379-1> this week in Nature.

“We produced images of Yellowstone’s subsurface hydrothermal ‘plumbing’
system—the pathways that hydrothermally heated waters take to reach the
surface,” said Steve Holbrook, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech and a
co-author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “We see clear geological
controls on the hydrothermal plumbing—in particular, the roles of deep
faults, shallow fractures, and the boundaries at the base of the thick lava
flows (tuff and rhyolite), all of which guide the movement of water.”

https://gizmodo.com/geophysicists-mapped-the-plumbing-that-feeds-yellowston-1848692532