A new column of steam rises from Yellowstone.
While the expansive volcano shows no hints of an eruption, magma brews beneath the surface, fueling hundreds of geysers and other heated phenomena. In a new blog on its website, the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory reports a new steaming feature in the national park, illustrative of this dynamic world’s constantly evolving, and thrilling, landscape.
“While driving south from Mammoth Hot Springs towards Norris Geyser Basin early on Aug. 5 last summer, a park scientist noticed a billowing steam column through the trees and across a marshy expanse,” wrote Yellowstone National Park geologists Jefferson Hungerford and Kiernan Folz-Donahue. “The eagle-eyed scientist notified the park geology team to verify if this was indeed new activity.”
It was.
The steaming hydrothermal vent is located at the base of an ancient lava flow, and geologists measured its temperature at 171 degrees Fahrenheit. It could be newly spawned activity from a steaming feature previously found nearby in 2003.
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Here’s a recent view of Yellowstone’s new hole, venting steam into the sky, which the geologists shared online:
The new steaming vent in Yellowstone National Park, photographed in August 2024.
Credit: Jefferson Hungerford / Yellowstone National Park
Steam rising from a new hydrothermal feature in the woods of Yellowstone National Park.
Credit: Mike Poland / USGS
The vent remains active this winter, but subdued, as water has drained into the opening. But come spring, it may robustly light up again.
“The activity from these features waxes and wanes with time — you might even say that some of them pick up steam! Sorry…we couldn’t resist,” the geologists wrote.
Today, Yellowstone remains a place of low volcanic risk. Sure, there are sometimes small explosions stoked by hot water and steam. But it’s mostly thermal pools and awesome geysers, reminding us of what could potentially awake, one distant day.
Yellowstone’s last volcanic eruption happened some 70,000 years ago, and the events weren’t giant eruptions on the scale that would deposit ash over a huge swath of the U.S. “Of the past 50 or so eruptions, almost all were simple lava flows,” the USGS explained. “If they occurred tomorrow or next year, they would have minimal direct effect outside Yellowstone National Park.”
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If magma does once again snake its way from deep inside Earth and saturate Yellowstone’s shallow underground reservoirs, an eruption wouldn’t be a surprise. We’d have many decades, if not centuries, of warning. The moving magma would trigger swarms of potent earthquakes, and the ground would majorly deform.
Such new steaming features, however, are just the norm in an ever-changing volcanic world.