But it is not the first time this has happened. About years ago, extreme heat and drought made Old Faithful come to a complete standstill for decades, a shift which changed everything from what plant species grew in the area to what the land looked like.
Looking at what happened then could be a mirror to the present — a way of looking back to look forward. The geological samples studied to help predict what happens next are full of mud, pollen and sludge — heavy, hard to reach and buried deep under lakes. In , Chris Schiller , a post-doctoral research associate at Montana State University, set out to learn what made one lake in the geyser basin go from thermal to freshwater centuries ago, and whether that stark change may have been caused by a period of staggering heat and drought that looks very much like the temperature shifts we are experiencing today.
The why remains more opaque, but we do know that the conditions that led to this transformation occurred in a period of extreme dryness, like today. What we do know, she says, is that the period of mega droughts that caused Old Faithful to dry up was potentially less extreme than now. Whitlock specializes in long-term environmental and climate change, and has spent four decades sifting through these sediment-rich lakes, publishing more than scientific papers on the topic.
Such a small shift may seem benign — until you realize that the last Ice Age was only about F 2. In recent decades, the average temperature in the park has been as high as or higher than in any period in the last 20, years, and could be the warmest of the last , years, according to the recent Yellowstone climate assessment.
One clue as to what will happen next can be found by looking at plant fossils. Modern Yellowstone is known for thick pine forests, expansive geyser basins with grassy vistas that break the tree cover. Furthermore, it has been erupting in nearly the same fashion throughout the recorded history of the park. Through the years, it has become one of the most studied geysers.
One result of this close observation is that the Park Rangers are able to predict its eruptions fairly accurately. This makes Old Faithful geyser one of the easiest geysers in Yellowstone to see. Old Faithful is deceiving. The benches around the geyser are over feet from the geyser but with nothing to judge the distance by, I rarely realize just how big the geyser is until I get further away.
Personally, I like the view from Geyser Hill. As with any geyser, watch the wind direction or you may only see steam. Old Faithful plays on the hour every hour This legend dates back to the early history of Yellowstone Park. Old Faithful has never played every hour on the hour. It is just as likely to play on the hour as it to play 17 minutes after the hour or 23 minutes after the hour or ……. You might see one interval of 60 minutes but it is very unlikely that you will see two in a row.
No geyser, including Old Faithful, plays at set times and intervals. There is always some variation. People expecting an hourly eruption are often surprised when they have to wait through a 90 minute to 2 hour interval. They then think that Old Faithful is slowing down.
Old Faithful still has its same interval range, minutes, that it has always had. In the last few years, long interval eruptions have been a little more common than they were a few decades so the yearly average has increased by a few minutes over what it was a few decades ago but this change is very small and the range of intervals is still the same.
Old Faithful went from 21 eruptions a day to 20 a day after the earthquake, which is not much of a slowdown, depending on how you look at it.
Eruptions can be predicted within about a ten-minute variation. How high does the geyser erupt? Old Faithful Geyser Yellowstone varies in the height of eruptions anywhere from to feet, averaging about or feet. How long does the eruption last? The eruptions usually last between one and a half minutes to five minutes.
How many gallons of water shoot out during one eruption?
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