Auburn photographer Scott Eliot was named this year’s winner in
the “Night Skies” category of the “Share the Experience” photo
contest for this stunning image of stars over Mount Rainier.
Night Skies winner: Mount
Rainier by Scott Eliot.
The annual contest, sponsored by the National Park Foundation,
invites amateur photographers to submit their favorite views,
moments and adventures from America’s national parks and public
lands. See all the winning photos on the
NPF Blog.
As Scott described it when posting his photo to the contest
website last year: “The early morning hours of late July begins to
bring the Milky Way into alignment with Mt. Rainier from a vantage
point along the Silver Forest Trail on the Sunrise Plateau of Mt.
Rainier National Park in Washington state.
“A mid-summers new moon and clear skies were the only occasion
necessary to spend a peaceful night out alone for some
astrophotography composing the Milky Way with Mt. Rainier, before
the Pacific Northwest weather changed its mind.,” he continued.
A group of scientists have been examining the “heart” of Old
Faithful — Yellowstone National Park’s most famous geyser. These
researchers are focused on figuring out exactly what causes this
rare geological formation to beat faithfully and forcefully,
beginning long before the geyser was discovered in 1870.
Old Faithful geyser,
Yellowstone National Park
Photo: Jon Sullivan, via Wikimedia
Commons
University of Utah researchers have finally produced substantial
images of the geological anatomy of the geyser, complete with its
natural underground ductwork that causes it to flush regularly.
“Here’s the iconic geyser of Yellowstone,” declared Robert
Smith, researcher and professor of geology and geophysics. “It’s
known around the world, but the complete geologic plumbing of
Yellowstone’s Upper Geyser Basin has not been mapped, nor have we
studied how the timing of eruptions is related to precursor ground
tremors before eruptions.”
Smith, who has spent 60 years working in America’s first
national park, said in a news release that he and
his associates may have cracked the mystery by mapping the
underground pathways that eventually carry steam and heated water
to the surface vent, which spews out every 44 to 125 minutes. The
mapping effort relied on a dense network of portable seismographs
and new methods of analyzing the data.
Results of the study are published in
Geophysical Research Letters. The paper’s lead author is
doctoral student Sin-Mei Wu. The news release was written by
science writer Paul Gabrielsen of the University of Utah’s
communications department.
Yellowstone National Park is underlain by two reservoirs of
active magma, one about 3 miles down, the other about 25. They are
the power behind the unusual formations and ongoing venting that
form chemical lakes and springs as well as the explosive
geysers.
The anatomy of Old Faithful
geyser, as revealed in new studies
Image: Sin-Mei Wu
Smith along with fellow researchers Jamie Farrell and Fan-Chi
Lin have spent years characterizing the magma reservoirs. They
track the small rumblings of ground movement, as recorded on
seismometers, and then plot out the underground structures.
“We try to use continuous ground shaking produced by humans,
cars, wind, water and Yellowstone’s hydrothermal boilings and
convert it into our signal,” Lin explained in the news release. “We
can extract a useful signal from the ambient background ground
vibration.”
About 30 permanent seismometers around the park monitor ground
shaking and earthquakes at a cost of about $10,000 each. In 2015,
the work expanded. Some 133 small seismometers, which cost about
$2,000 each, were deployed for two weeks around Old Faithful and
Geyser Hill. These cheaper seismometers were developed by the
company FairfieldNodal for
oil and gas exploration, but they became a key to understanding Old
Faithful’s seismic activity.
Small portable seismometers
were the key to tracing underground formations.
Photo: Paul Gabrielsen
The data show patterns of intense tremors lasting about 60
minutes followed by 30 minutes of quiet. The eruption of Old
Faithful occurs not during the peak of shaking but just before
everything goes quiet.
The cycle begins after an eruption when the geyser’s underground
reservoir starts filling up with water. Pressure in the reservoir
builds up from heated water and lots of aqueous bubbles, which
rumble until an eruption occurs. The eruption cools the water very
quickly causing an implosion that registers on the seismometers
before everything stops and the cycle starts again.
Typically, seismic imaging uses a man-made source to shake the
ground, such as setting off an explosion or banging a hammer on a
metal plate in the ground. Lin and Wu developed a method of sifting
useful signals from the natural hydrothermal rumblings, thanks to
the number and location of small seismometers.
“It’s amazing that you can use the hydrothermal source to image
the structure here,” Wu said.
The data showed that tremors from Old Faithful were not reaching
the western boardwalk, while seismic waves from another
hydrothermal feature also slowed and scattered in the same general
area. That pointed to some kind of underground feature that became
the focus of intense study using a dense network of the small
seismometers. The researchers believe they pinpointed the location
of Old Faithful’s long-sought reservoir.
Wu estimates that the reservoir, a network of fractured rock, is
about 650 feet across and can hold more than 79 million gallons of
water, as compared to Old Faithful’s eruption, which releases about
8,000 gallons at a time.
“Although it’s a rough estimation, we were surprised that it was
so large,” Wu said.
The research team is returning to the park this winter for more
studies into the subsurface structure and to develop higher
resolution images at Old Faithful. Smith hopes to use similar
methods to reveal hidden features in other areas, including the
Norris Geyser Basin — the hottest geothermal area in the park.
Meanwhile, National Park Service officials would like to know if
any of the geothermal features and underlying magma might pose a
future risk to people and buildings in the park, especially around
the large visitor center at Old Faithful. The underground mapping
could help with those questions.
Lin credits Smith’s long-term relationship with the park as
opening the door to the research being conducted by the University
of Utah. “You need new techniques,” he said, “but also those
long-term relationships.”
Old Faithful was named on Sept. 18, 1870, by members of the
Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition. As later described in Nathanial
P. Langford’s account of the expedition:
“It spouted at regular intervals nine times during out stay, the
columns of boiling water being thrown from 90 to 125 feet at each
discharge, which lasted from 15 to 20 minutes. We gave it the name
‘Old Faithful.’”
In those days, nobody could explain why Old Faithful acted the
way it did, but some of the early visitors put the geyser to a
practical use. In his 1883 guide for tourists, Henry J. Winser
wrote:
“Old Faithful is sometimes degraded by being made a laundry.
Garments placed in the crater during quiescence are ejected
thoroughly washed when the eruption takes place. Gen. Sheridan’s
men, in 1882, found that linen and cotton fabrics were uninjured by
the action of the water, but woolen clothes were torn to
shreds.”
It would be another 135 years before the plumbing of this
natural “laundry” would be explained with the use of advanced
technology.
Time-lapse photography can add a new dimension to the way we see
things. When done well, these speeded-up videos not only help us
see things in a new way but also call us to remember feelings about
special places and natural wonders.
On their first visit to Olympic National Park, brothers Will and
Jim Pattiz captured images from various park locations for what
would become a captivating video for the series “More Than Just Parks.”
They traveled to some prime locations that many of us have visited,
but their careful use of time-lapse equipment create a new sense of
inspiration for familiar places.
So find a quiet moment, sit back and enjoy their video
full-screen on your computer if not your TV.
If you’d like to learn more about the video project and what the
brothers learned about Olympic National Park, read the interview on
the
Exotic Hikes website, or check out the background on “More Than Just
Parks.”
One of my all-time favorite time-lapse videos was shot in
Yellowstone National Park, where photographer Christopher Cauble
captured the rhythms of nature in a place where geysers, streams,
clouds and even the animals move with a natural fluidity. I
especially like the sections where the video slows down to remind
us about the normal pace of events — something not seen in most
time-lapse videos.
The last video on this page shows Mount Rainier in a time-lapse
video by West Coast
Time Lapse, a company of Nate Wetterauer and Chase Jensen. Like
the Olympic National Park video, this one about Mount Rainier was
posted within the past year.
If you would like to see more time-lapse video of national
parks, take a look at
“15 time-lapse videos that capture national parks at their
best” by The Wilderness Society. It contains parks from here in
Washington (a different Olympic National Park video) to Maine, from
Alaska to Texas.
The effort to reintroduce fishers into Olympic National Park
continues to be an exciting good-news story, but the implications
may be even greater than they seem at first glance.
We must wait to see whether the males and females among the 40
or more fishers will find each other. But biologists say there’s a
good chance they will, and researchers may discover some dens with
kits either this spring or maybe next year.
I had the privilege of seeing five fishers released yesterday
near Staircase Ranger Station in Olympic National Park. These were
the first animals to be released on the east side of the mountains.
For a description of their rapid escape into the woods, see my
story and watch the video in
today’s Kitsap Sun.
While on the outing, I talked to Jasmine Minbashian of
Conservation Northwest about the potential for unexpected results
from this experiment. As an example, she wondered about the
potential of a trophic cascade, such as seen in Yellowstone Park
after the introduction of wolves. In a chain of events, the wolves
have done a great favor for fish in the national park.
Wolves not only eat elk at times, but their presence frightens
away these animals that love to eat the shoots of aspen trees.
Without the elk browsing continuously, the aspens grow into dense
vegetation that can provide shade, cover and insects — all to the
benefits of fish and other creatures.
Chris Conway of the New
York Times does a nice job explaining this in a brief story
from Aug. 5, 2007. For a little longer version, see Science
Daily, which points out:
Prior to the re-introduction of wolves, scientists found there
were many small sprouting shoots of these important tree species,
and numbers of large trees 70 years old or more — but practically
nothing in between. High populations of grazing ungulates,
primarily elk, had grazed on the small tree shoots at leisure and
with little fear of attack.
But the ecological damage, researchers say, went far beyond just
trees. The loss of trees and shrubs opened the door to significant
stream erosion. Beaver dams declined. Food webs broke down, and the
chain of effects rippled through birds, insects, fish and other
plant and animal species.
For more information about trophic cascades, go to the Web site
of Oregon State
University, where this issue is being studied in depth.
As for Olympic National Park, the extermination of wolves on the
peninsula may have had a cascading effect on species that depend on
cottonwood and bigleaf maples. The Fall 2008 issue of
Island Geoscience (PDF 732 kb) tells it this way:
In 1890, members of the Press Expedition found the banks of the
upper Quinault River “so dense with underbrush as to be almost
impenetrable,” they wrote at the time. Logs jammed the rivers,
dense tree canopies shaded and cooled the streams, and trout and
salmon thrived, along with hundreds of species of plants and
animals.
“Today, you go through the same area and instead of dense
vegetation that you have to fight through, it’s a park-like stand
of predominantly big trees,” said Bill Ripple, a co-author of the
study and forestry professor at Oregon State University. “It’s just
a different world.”
“Our study shows that there has been almost no recruitment of
new cottonwood and bigleaf maple trees since the wolves
disappeared, and also likely impacts on streamside shrubs, which
are very important for river stability,” said Robert Beschta, lead
author of the study and professor emeritus of forest hydrology at
OSU. “Decreases in woody plant communities allow river banks to
rapidly erode and river channels to widen.”
Efforts to reintroduce wolves to the Olympic Peninsula are on
hold for the time being. But we have a lot to think about. What we
can learn from the fisher may be much more than the idea that we
should have a few more of the furry animals running around.
