The Yellowstone caldera gets its chilling label as a supervolcano due to its capability to inflict devastation worldwide. However, a pair of tourists risked a more local issue after they were arrested for standing too close to the Old Faithful geyser, accused of “thermal trespassing”. The two men were caught walking “dangerously close” to the spout of the legendary geyser on September 10, National Park Service (NPS) officials revealed.
Old Faithful is a highly predictable geothermal feature, which has erupted every 44 to 125 minutes since 2000.
However, USGS scientist Jacob Lowenstern detailed during a lecture in 2015 the more serious risks in Yellowstone National Park.
He told Stanford University students: “So we’ve worked from these every 500,000 year big eruptions to a million years to lava flows that happen every 10 or 20 thousand years and big earthquakes maybe happening every three or four hundred years.
“Then we have these hydrothermal explosions that are found and all of the stars on this map represent hydrothermal explosions that are post-glacial so they’re all in about the last 15,000 years.
Jacob Lowenstern has warned against the hazards at Yellowstone (Image: GETTY/YOUTUBE)
The Old Faithful geyser has made headlines (Image: GETTY)
This pose a much bigger threat to visitors
“The largest of them is Mary Bay right here which is three kilometres across (two miles), so it’s an enormous hole in the ground and these are not actually volcanic events in a sense the magma does not appear to be involved.
“These appear to be truly geothermal events, here we have Indian Pond, that’s one of them which is about 4,000 years old and about 400 metres across.
“In this case you have a boiling groundwater, it’s boiling down as pressure increases, so it’s always at boiling point.”
Dr Lowenstern went on to explain how unpredictable geothermal features like this pose a much bigger threat to visitors.
He continued: “If you’re able to destabilise the top of the system and decrease the pressure on the system, you’ll find that the water is way above its boiling point, so you get flashing.
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Dr Lowenstern showed the hazards in the park (Image: USGS)
“You get phase transformation as water turns to steam and there’s great volume expansion and it breaks the rock up and throws it into the air.
“This is something that has happened quite a few times in the last 10,000 years at Yellowstone and is probably one of the biggest hazards to visitors coming to the park.
“It still doesn’t happen very often, but there are hydrothermal explosions that are happening pretty much all the time.”
In 1959, Yellowstone National Park faced one of its most shocking events – the Hebgen Lake earthquake.
The natural disaster caused massive damage, including 28 fatalities and a considerable £9million in repairs to highways and timbers.
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Indian Pond poses a threat (Image: GETTY)
Yellowstone is constantly monitored by USGS (Image: GETTY)
Martin Stryker was 15 when it struck, while he was camping with his father, stepmother and two brothers.
He detailed his horror to Earth Magazine in 2009, stating: “At first, I thought it was a thunderstorm.
“When you’re in something of that magnitude, you can almost hear the plates grinding together.”
Turning towards the tent where his father and stepmother were sleeping, Stryker tragically saw something that made his blood run cold.
A boulder almost two metres high had fallen where they were sleeping.
What a future eruption could look like (Image: DX)
Mr Stryker detailed: “I didn’t immediately alert my brothers.
“I went to see if there was anything I could do, and there wasn’t.
“I told them that Dad and Ethyl have been killed, there’s a major earthquake going on, and we need to get out of here.”
After only three weeks the damned river created a lake more than 170 feet deep.
The lake the quake created now covers an area five miles long and a third of a mile wide.
Today, tourists to the area can stop by the Earthquake Lake Visitor Centre, which is situated 27 miles north of West Yellowstone to re-live the horrors from more than half a century ago.