The constant churning of Mud Volcano, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

It should come as no surprise to any of you who have ever visited a unit of the National Park System more than once: there’s always something new to learn. Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming/Montana/Idaho is no exception. After a summer visit to this national park, new things were learned, interesting trivia picked up, and thus a new quiz and trivia piece was created. See how much you really know about this park. You might surprise yourself … or you might decide maybe you need a return trip to brush on your Yellowstone storehouse of knowledge.

1. True or False: Mud Volcano is one of the most acidic springs in Yellowstone.

              a) True

              b) False

2. True or False: At Mammoth Hot Springs, inactive terraces underlie most of the area, including beneath the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel and the Albright Visitor Center across and up the street from the hotel.

              a) True

              b) False

A view of Lower Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

3. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River runs for ___ miles.

              a) 10

              b) 20

              c) 30

              d) 40

Just what is in those milky-looking pools at Porcelain Basin in Yellowstone National Park? / Rebecca Latson

Just what is in those milky-looking pools at Porcelain Basin in Yellowstone National Park? / Rebecca Latson

4. Walk along the boardwalks of the Porcelain Basin section of Norris Geyser Basin. You’ll notice pools of milky blue water. The milky hue is due to:

              a) Calcium carbonate

              b) Fine-grained clay sediments

              c) Heat-loving algae

              d) Silica

West Thumb Geyser Basin landscape, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

5. True or False: the bay in which is located West Thumb Geyser Basin is actually a caldera within a larger caldera.

              a) True

              b) False

Watching Old Faithful erupt from inside the visitor center, Yellowstone Natitonal Park / Rebecca Latson

6. At Upper Geyser Basin, rangers forecast the eruption times of five geysers there: Old Faithful, Castle, Grand, Daisy, and ___.

              a) Giant

              b) Spasmodic

              c) Riverside

              d) Artemisia

7. True or False: Lower Geyser Basin, which includes Fountain Paint Pot and the Firehole Lake area, contains all five types of hydrothermal features.

              a) True

              b) False

What is this stuff rimming Doublet Pool? Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

8. True or False: During your visit to Yellowstone, you’ve probably heard about silicious sinter or geyserite being deposited around the edges of hot springs and geysers. Silicious sinter and geyserite are the same thing.

              a) True

              b) False

9. True or False: Water heated by the Yellowstone magmatic system heats Chico Hot Springs in Montana’s Paradise Valley.

              a) True

              b) False

Roaring Mountain, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

10. Roaring Mountain, located between Norris Geyser Basin and Mammoth Hot Springs, is a classic example of a/an ___.

              a) Acid-sulfate thermal area

              b) Tuff cliff

              c) Hydrothermal explosion build-up

              d) Silicious fumarole depository

Trivia

Bovine brucellosis is not the only infectious disease that can attack wildlife at Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

Humans are not the only creatures here on Earth to suffer from various diseases and illnesses. According to the Atlas of Yellowstone, this national park has a long history of infectious wildlife diseases. It’s not just bovine brucellosis, although that may currently be what you hear most about, but also pneumonia, sylvatic plague, chronic wasting disease, Parvo, hantavirus, whirling disease, white-nose syndrome, various viral and fungal diseases, and even pinkeye, which can be deadly to all or certain wildlife populations.

Map showing the path of the Yellowstone hot spot /Modified from Barry et al. (GSA Special Paper 497, p. 45-66, 2013) via USGS

The Yellowstone hotspot—the source of heat that powers Yellowstone’s vast volcanic system – was once thought to have been initiated about 17 million years ago. According to an article by the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, however, it looks like this hot spot might have been around probably 50 million years!

Just what is a hot spot? It’s a stationary area on Earth that exists over a mantle plume (an area of hot, but not molten, magma). Heat from this extra hot magma causes melting and thinning of the rocky crust, which leads to widespread volcanic activity on Earth’s surface above the plume. For example, the Hawaiian Islands are creations of a hot spot.

In the case of the Yellowstone hot spot, it began off the coast of northern California and, as the North American tectonic plate moved toward the west, this hot spot continued to create volcanic action in spots of what are now Oregon and Washington. Eventually, the North American plate situated what is now the Yellowstone area over this hot spot.

The Albright Visitor Center at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

How many of you have visited the Albright Visitor Center at Mammoth Hot Springs? Long before it was ever a visitor center, it was a part of Fort Yellowstone, built to protect the park from serious threats like poaching, souvenir hunters breaking off pieces of fragile thermal features, and development of tourist spots right next to fragile (and dangerous) hydrothermal features. In 1890, Congress appropriated $50,000 (what would be over 1 million dollars today) to build a permanent post for the U.S. Army’s presence to protect Yellowstone for the next 32 years. The Albright Visitor Center was once the 1909 Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, with an officer’s mess hall, a kitchen, a sitting room, and apartments for six single officers.

Quiz Answers

1b False

Located across the road from the Mud Volcano area is Sulphur Caldron, one of the most acidic springs in Yellowstone. Sulphur Caldron has a pH of approximately 1-2, which is about as acidic as stomach acid.

2a True

Inactive terraces underlie most of the Mammoth Hot Springs area, including under the hotel and the Albright Visitor Center. If you park your car in that long row of parking spaces looking out toward some fenced areas of a field, and walk toward those fenced areas, you will see they were built to protect people and wildlife from the ground openings (and vice versa, to protect those openings from the people and wildlife).

What lies below at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

3b

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River runs for 20 miles (32 km).

4d

The milky look to the hot springs at Porcelain Basin is due to the presence of silica (the primary component of glass). As a matter of fact, Norris’s thermal waters contain the highest concentration of silica in Yellowstone. But, why is there so much silica there? According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS):

The igneous rock rhyolite is the most abundant rock in Yellowstone, and it contains 75 percent rhyolite. The hot groundwater of Norris Basin reacts with the rhyolite to remove the silica from the rock and dissolve it, much like salt or sugar is dissolved in hot water.

5a True

About 174,000 years ago, a volcanic eruption caused a part of the landscape now covered by Yellowstone Lake to collapse, thus creating the West Thumb caldera. This depression filled with water to become a large bay of Yellowstone Lake. The West Thumb caldera (and Yellowstone Lake), lie within the greater Yellowstone Caldera, which is one of the world’s largest and encompasses the central and southern portions of the park.

6. c

At Upper Geyser Basin, rangers forecast the eruption times of five geysers there: Old Faithful, Castle, Grand, Daisy, and Riverside.

7b False

 Lower Geyser Basin, which includes Fountain Paint Pot and the Firehole Lake area, contains four of the five types of hydrothermal features: geysers, hot springs, mudpots, and fumeroles. The fifth type of hydrothermal feature is the travertine terrace, perfect examples of which you can see at Mammoth Hot Springs.

8a True

Silicious sinter and geyserite are the same. Both are names for a lightweight, porous, opaline variety of silica that is white or nearly white and deposited as incrustations around hot springs and geysers.

9a True

According to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory in one of their Caldera Chronicles articles:

The area between Norris Geyser Basin and Mammoth Hot Springs, informally called the Norris-Mammoth Corridor, hosts abundant thermal and tectonic activity and is an area of fluid transport, allowing water heated by the Yellowstone magmatic system to migrate out of the caldera to the north. The corridor is defined by a series of large, active faults that provide the pathway for these fluids, which feed hot spring activity that extends well north of the park, for example, to Chico Hot Springs in Paradise Valley, Montana.

10a

According to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory:

Roaring Mountain is a classic example of an acid-sulfate thermal area. No geysers are present on Roaring Mountain; rather, the surface is dotted with numerous steam and gas vents. The gases that are emitted are at or above boiling temperatures for that elevation, and their acidic nature has caused much of the rock in the area, which is densely welded ash erupted during the caldera-forming event that created Yellowstone caldera, to become altered into clay minerals, especially kaolinite and smectite. That alteration gives the thermal area its chalky, soft appearance.