Yellowstone National Park is a recreation area like no other, packed with a large number of thermal features like hot springs, mudpots and geysers. The US Geological Survey (USGS) carefully monitors these features, as Yellowstone is also a supervolcano with an incredibly violent history, and these are a fairly reliable indicator of seismic activity. And it appears Yellowstone’s famed Steamboat Geyser – the tallest active geyser in the world – is about to smash its annual record for eruptions.
Steamboat Geyser is capable of blasting jets of boiling water 300ft (91m) into the air.
The USGS revealed: “During the month, seven water eruptions occurred, on June 1, 7, 12, 15, 19, 23, and 28, bringing the total number of eruptions for the year to 25.
“At this rate, the annual record for eruptions — 32, set last year – will fall this summer.”
And there has been an additional indication of renewed activity inside the volcano, hidden beneath Yellowstone.
June witnessed another record, broken for the shortest time ever recorded between two Steamboat eruptions.
The eruptions were separated by just three days, three hours and 48 minutes.
USGS researchers have been monitoring Steamboat Geyser using a network of 51 seismometers to record information about its activity.
Although Steamboat has been more active than expected since March 2018, the thermal feature has also experienced recent periods of relative calm.
There were, for example, no significant eruptions between October 1991 and May 2000, according to USGS data.
When Steamboat does erupt, its powerful water jets can fire for up to 40 minutes.
These are then followed by powerful discharges of steam which can last for more than 24 hours and reach up to 650ft (200m) tall.
Although large eruptions are relatively infrequent, minor ones between 10ft and 15ft (3m to 4.5m) are common.
Unlike Yellowstone’s other famous geyser Old Faithful, which is highly predictable, Steamboat’s major eruptions are much more difficult forecast.
Despite recent activity indicating intervals between significant eruptions can be relatively short, Steamboat has in fact gone up to half a century without erupting – between 1911 and 1961.
The USGS said in a statement: “This data will be a terrific complement to last year’s May-June deployment and should teach scientists quite a lot about Steamboat’s activity patterns and plumbing system.”
Yellowstone is home to an enormous array of more than 10,000 hydrothermal features, such as mudpots, fumaroles and hot springs.
This includes more than 500 geysers, which is around 50 percent of the world’s total.
Geysers erupt when hot rocks below the Earth’s surface in areas of volcanic activity heat water in underground reservoirs.
When this water becomes superheated, it rapidly expands, blasting its way to the surface through cracks and fissures in the ground.