In this photo released by the National Park Service, park staff assess damage to the Biscuit Basin boardwalk following Tuesday’s hydrothermal explosion in Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
National Park Service/AP
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National Park Service/AP
Editor’s note: This story contains a video of an explosion that contains profanity.
A big explosion caused tourists to fall to the ground Boiling water, mud, rocks and steam shot high into the air Tuesday on the boardwalk of one of Yellowstone National Park’s famed hot spring pools.
A video posted on Facebook showed park visitors fleeing as huge black clouds rose.
The park said there were no reports of injuries, but the boardwalk was damaged — a Park Service photo showed it covered in gray and black debris and a fence torn apart. The explosion occurred in the Biscuit Basin Thermal Zone, near Black Diamond Pool and about 2 miles northwest of Old Faithful Geyser.
The park said the cause was a hydrothermal explosion.
In hydrothermal systems like Yellowstone, water often It’s probably very close to the boiling point, said Marianne Karplus, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied geysers in Yellowstone. When underground pressure drops, it “basically causes liquid water to flash into vapor,” she said. Vapor takes up more space than liquid – expands. “When that happens, it could cause an explosion.”
The U.S. Geological Survey said there were hydrothermal explosions in Yellowstone’s Norris Geyser Basin in 1989 and in Biscuit Basin in 2009. “A minor event” was also recorded in the Norris Geyser Basin in April this year.
“In modern times, most hydrothermal explosions create relatively small craters, just a few meters in diameter, or that size,” Capras said.
Although the explosion seen in the video was large, the park and the USGS characterized it as a small explosion. Hydrothermal explosions can reach heights of more than a mile and leave craters a mile in diameter. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, larger explosions occur on average every 700 years.
The park service says the cookie bowl is now Closed for safety reasons.
Capras said she knows the park has been trying to install more instruments to try to detect similar situations. before the incident. But because of the dynamic nature of geothermal systems, “these types of events are difficult to predict or hard to predict. That’s why in the case of this morning, and what happened in 2009 and other times, it was a complete surprise.”
