A new picture of the hot water beneath Yellowstone’s geysers

Enlarge / Grand Prismatic Spring, Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park. (credit: Ignacio Palacios / Getty Images)

The vast volcanic caldera at Yellowstone National Park is just the latest in a long string of volcanic sites, all of which seem to be linked to a hot blob of material that may go all the way down to the Earth's mantle. There's been a lot of effort put into tracing that hot material, given that some of the earlier eruptions from it have been utterly enormous.

But there's also a connection between that hot material and the features, like geysers and hot springs, that make Yellowstone a major tourist destination. And those connections are very difficult to trace. But a new study has proposed a map that shows how the hot water of Yellowstone flows beneath the feet of visitors and why it reaches the surface at specific sites.

Mapping the plumbing

We tend to talk about water under our feet as traveling through underground rivers, but that creates a misleading image. In reality, water creeps along as a broad flow through permeable materials, its path shifted by things like faults and hard, impermeable rock, like granite. Tracking it isn't the simplest thing.

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