Yellowstone: Big Volcano Ready to Erupt | How the Earth Was Made (S1, E8) | Full Episode | History — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:02earth a 4.5 billion year old planet still  evolving as continents shift and clash
2. 0:12volcanoes erupt and glaciers grow and  recede the earth's crust is carved in
3. 0:19countless fascinating ways leaving a  trail of geological mysteries behind
4. 0:27and one of the greatest is right here  at yellowstone national park in wyoming
5. 0:35this is one of the world's most geologically  active places shaken by up to 5 000 earthquakes
6. 0:42every year and with more geysers and hot  springs than in the rest of the world combined
7. 0:48why is yellowstone so active how did it form  and why here in the heart of the rockies
8. 0:57scientists studying yellowstone  are uncovering a violent past
9. 1:01carved by water crushed by ancient glaciers
10. 1:07and blasted by the biggest volcanic  eruptions ever known on the planet
11. 1:19and even today yellowstone is one of  the most dangerous places on earth
12. 1:35yellowstone national park is one of the  most amazing places on earth and it's unique
13. 1:43it contains some of america's  most stunning scenery
14. 1:47and wildlife that attracts  three million tourists a year
15. 1:52to understand where yellowstone came from and why  it is so active today we need to take a journey
16. 2:00back into the distant past of the north american  continent and deep into the earth's interior
17. 2:08yellowstone sits 8 000 feet up  on a remote mountain plateau
18. 2:13primarily within wyoming but stretching  into parts of idaho and montana
19. 2:20the park covers 3468 square miles 63 miles  north to south and 54 miles east to west
20. 2:32and it's on top of one of the world's most  unusual and deadliest geological structures
21. 2:39what's unusual about the  park are the wildlife unusual
22. 2:45no is the wide open space unusual no  you've got it all over the western u.s
23. 2:52what's unusual it's a very unusual  geology that created the park
24. 3:00yellowstone was founded as the world's  first national park because of the geology
25. 3:08it's this strange geology that attracts  teams of scientists to the park
26. 3:14their task to piece together the story  of the incredible processes that built
27. 3:19this unique extraordinary landscape by  digging deep into yellowstone's past
28. 3:27the geologic history of yellowstone goes back  to the formation of the north american continent
29. 3:35some of the rocks in yellowstone are 2.8  to 3.2 billion year old rocks some of the
30. 3:43oldest in north america only by traveling  back into the past can we figure out why
31. 3:49in this particular location there are  2 400 miles of rivers more than 300
32. 3:56waterfalls and the world's greatest concentration  of 10 000 hot water springs bubbling mud holes
33. 4:07gas vents and geysers what do these features  reveal about this landscape and how it was formed
34. 4:22the investigation begins at yellowstone's  star attraction old faithful
35. 4:29it's a key clue to what's  going on underneath the surface
36. 4:38located in the southwest of yellowstone  park the geyser puts on an explosive display
37. 4:43every 90 minutes or so blasting out  thousands of gallons of scalding hot water
38. 4:55yellowstone is like no other place on  earth there is so much heat coming out here
39. 5:00it's really a singular phenomenon
40. 5:04well after about a 90-minute nap old faithful has  roared back to life it wasn't actually napping it
41. 5:09was recharging the temperature of the water was  increasing the system was pressurizing beneath
42. 5:14old faithful is a rather complex plumbing system  filled with caverns and conduits and constrictions
43. 5:22rainwater saturating the ground around the  geyser slowly fills its underground reservoir
44. 5:29hot rocks below ground heat the  water under pressure for around
45. 5:3390 minutes suddenly some water  spurts through a tiny five inch wide
46. 5:38crack in the rocks this causes a drop  in the pressure within the water chamber
47. 5:45in an instant thousands of gallons of water  are turned to steam and blasted up into the air
48. 5:56when the pressure builds up enough  steam bubbles start rising to the
49. 5:59surface the system depressurizes  and the full eruption can occur
50. 6:03old faithful shows that rocks  below the surface are very hot
51. 6:16scientists find clues to a violent past 34 miles
52. 6:20southeast of the hot springs on the shores  of a circular lake called indian ponds
53. 6:28as a field geologist my job is to basically  be a rock detective and so i try to determine
54. 6:35what their origin is and what the history  is of that particular rock there we go
55. 6:41okay now in this particular  case let's look at this
56. 6:46this rock when it started it was just a loose  sand you could just put your fingers through it
57. 6:54the solid boulder is formed from  millions of individual grains of sand
58. 7:01microscopic analysis reveals the  grains have been cemented together
59. 7:04by chemicals and pressure deep under the ground
60. 7:10but how did the rock get to the surface
61. 7:15morgan has chemically dated the rocks  and discovered that 3000 years ago
62. 7:19the boulder was blasted out of the ground by  the hot water explosion of a gigantic geyser
63. 7:27you would see boiling water rock fragments and  fine muddy material being ejected up into the air
64. 7:36as high as three to five thousand feet and then  at some point material would start raining down
65. 7:44from this explosion column now you wouldn't  want to be standing next to one of those
66. 7:53indian ponds is the crater  that the guys are left behind
67. 8:03but it is dwarfed by the crater morgan  has found at mary bay in yellowstone lake
68. 8:11morgan has dated this geyser explosion to 13  000 years ago so here we are in the middle of
69. 8:18yellowstone lake and it says you can see  a beautiful day and it's nice and placid
70. 8:24but on the floor of yellowstone  lake it's anything but quiet
71. 8:29morgan's research proves that geysers were  exploding around the lake and even under
72. 8:33the water between thirteen thousand and  three thousand years ago and their size
73. 8:40suggests that whatever was powering them  was huge but is it still active today
74. 8:48a clue comes from underwater vents  at the bottom of the geyser crater
75. 8:54they pump out vast quantities  of hot water and gases
76. 9:03to find out what's creating the gases  jake lowenstern and his assistant collect
77. 9:08samples from the hot springs  in the center of the park
78. 9:13the funnel they use is designed to collect  up gas bubbles before they reach the surface
79. 9:18so that they're not contaminated by ordinary air  let it sit for five minutes let the oxygen get out
80. 9:27yeah it is a very complex mix of gases and but  we have a lot of tools that we can use to try to
81. 9:33unravel this rather complicated information so  we'll look at all of the gases that are coming
82. 9:40out we can learn about the different kinds of  rocks beneath yellowstone and try to understand
83. 9:44how things might be changing from  from week to week or year to year or
84. 9:49decade to decade analysis of the gases  reveals that they are a mix of carbon dioxide
85. 9:56sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide it is the  same mix that is found coming out of volcanoes
86. 10:06but the final clue to what's  actually going on underground
87. 10:09is found on the edge of the same hot springs
88. 10:14so these are quartz crystals that we collected  on the side of the pool there this stuff is what
89. 10:19remains it gets tossed up it forms a little berm  around the side of the pool it's all beautiful
90. 10:24little quartz crystals some of them have a  little bit of iron staining and other things
91. 10:29but most most of them are nice shades of yellow  and clear quartz crystals like these can only have
92. 10:37formed as a hot molten rock lava flow slowly  cooled after being erupted onto the surface
93. 10:43from deep underground so the crystals are clear  evidence that under the springs is a volcano
94. 10:55yellowstone's hot water features all point to  one conclusion yellowstone must be powered by
95. 11:02the heat of a volcano geysers only erupt if the  rocks are hot enough to turn water into steam
96. 11:10gases from underwater have the same composition  as those from volcanoes quartz in the hot springs
97. 11:17must have come from volcanic lava there is an  immense amount of energy coming out of the ground
98. 11:25that's expressed by the geysers the mud pots the  hot springs and the steam vents where's all that
99. 11:32heat coming from it's coming from the molten  rock associated with the yellowstone volcano
100. 11:39but that leaves a big question unanswered in  this gentle rolling landscape where's the volcano
101. 12:00yellowstone's unique volcanic geology is  potentially deadly dangerous it makes it crucial
102. 12:08to monitor what's happening under the ground the  yellowstone volcano is a very very active volcanic
103. 12:14system and so it really requires observation  everything that we do here has a research
104. 12:21component but it also has a volcano monitoring  component and you know if if if activity picks
105. 12:28up here we're going to want to know something  about the plumbing system beneath us here
106. 12:34to try and predict when yellowstone's  hidden volcano will erupt in the future
107. 12:39scientists study its geological past
108. 12:44part of our task is to look at the landscape  and read the geologic story and there's
109. 12:51so many clues and so much evidence here to  look at that it's a fascinating place to work
110. 13:01scientists began investigating yellowstone even  before it became the world's first national park
111. 13:07in 1872 but observations of this  astonishing land began long before that
112. 13:20dating ancient arrowheads shows that native  americans first lived here 11 000 years ago
113. 13:29their legends of yellowstone's  angry spirits who made the ground
114. 13:32tremble were passed on to early  explorers such as lewis and clark
115. 13:39later reports from trappers explorers and mountain  men like john coulter and jim bridger told
116. 13:45of geysers that fired 70 feet into the air and  spring so hot that meat was readily cooked in them
117. 13:55but these were thought to be tall tales  until the 1860s when geologists investigated
118. 14:01and found that the lava flows and hot  vents were signs of volcanic activity
119. 14:14but something clearly wasn't right nobody  could actually find the yellowstone volcano
120. 14:22we say that yellowstone is one of the world's most  active volcanoes people come out here visitors
121. 14:29other scientists and they say what do you mean  i i don't see a smoking volcano i don't see a
122. 14:35big steep volcanic crater all the things that  one normally thinks of for an active volcano
123. 14:44so without obvious signs of a volcano  scientists hunted for other clues
124. 14:52they would find them in the sweeping forests  of lodgepole pines these are the only plants
125. 14:59that thrive on the poor soil that comes from  a particular type of lava called rhyolite
126. 15:09and yellowstone's constant  plagues of mosquitoes also
127. 15:12reveal the presence of that same rhyolite lava
128. 15:18the rhyolites are are not very permeable and  so in it creates these little ponds of water
129. 15:26that never go away and those are wonderful  breeding grounds for mosquitoes there are a
130. 15:34lot of mosquitoes if you can't see them  flying around my head so the pine trees
131. 15:39and the insects both indicate that there's a lot  of rhyolite in yellowstone and that's important
132. 15:47because rhyolite lava creates  incredibly violent volcanic eruptions
133. 15:53it's much more like a bread dough it's  about a thousand to a million times
134. 15:58thicker or more viscous we put a bunch of gas  in it we can have a very explosive eruption
135. 16:06but if rhyolite lava is that explosive  how big a bang did it produce
136. 16:24to find that out scientists  looked not inside yellowstone park
137. 16:29but in a far away river valley at meadowcreek  wyoming cutting down through the land over
138. 16:39millions of years the river has exposed an  unusual thin layer of black rock in the cliff face
139. 16:48a nearby road cutting lets investigators  examine the mysterious dark rock
140. 16:59if you look at the sample in detail up close  you can see that here's a pumice fragment these
141. 17:05these red fragments here are our little rock  fragments and if we were to make a thin section
142. 17:12of this rock and look at it under the microscope  you would in fact see compressed uh glass shards
143. 17:20the black layer that geologists call  obsidian is actually a type of glass
144. 17:26it's crucial evidence that the rocks  and soil here came out of a volcano
145. 17:34because obsidian is forged when boiling hot  ash and gas rapidly cool under great pressure
146. 17:44and that's just what happens when hot  volcanic clouds roll out across the landscape
147. 17:51the obsidian forms in the very bottom layers  cooled from below and crushed by the weight of
148. 17:56hot debris on top the ash layer that crushed the  obsidian at meadow creek is still visible today
149. 18:07its base is characterized by this very thick  dense obsidian as as the flow came to rest
150. 18:13and was compacted and then above this dense  glass layer is it grades upwards into a tan
151. 18:19sort of region and continues up for about an  additional 30 feet and then up on top of that
152. 18:24as it's exposed today modern soil has  formed and we can see growing up there
153. 18:28various sorts of vegetation trees  and grasses and things of that sort
154. 18:34studying the mineral composition of the ash  proved that it came from an ancient volcanic blast
155. 18:39in yellowstone park and there's only one way that  so much ash could have been blasted so very far
156. 18:47away from its source the eruption must have been  larger far larger than anything ever seen by man
157. 18:57so big scientists now label it as a super eruption
158. 19:03we're looking at this deposit  from a super eruption and yet
159. 19:07we're over 50 miles from the  source of the of the eruption
160. 19:13the geologists have recreated what must have  happened here on the day that yellowstone exploded
161. 19:20incandescent avalanches of ash raced out  of the park in all directions so this is
162. 19:27traveling at very high velocity easily over  100 miles per hour across the land surface
163. 19:33and obliterating everything in its path  it was extremely hot when it arrived here
164. 19:39and perhaps as hot as 1500 degrees fahrenheit to  it twice a pizza oven i mean it's just very hot
165. 19:46so what would it have been like to be standing  on this spot hundreds of thousands of years ago
166. 19:53on the day when the yellowstone  ash cloud roared over the horizon
167. 19:58the impact of this would would be absolutely  unimaginable it would be i think you would be
168. 20:04disarticulated burned and unrecognizable and  it would be very difficult to find any of you
169. 20:14all of the evidence about the size of the
170. 20:16super eruption helped solve the  mystery of the missing volcano
171. 20:21scientists realized that the super eruption was  so enormous that it must have blown the volcano to
172. 20:27pieces swarms of mosquitoes show that  explosive rhyolite lava underlies parts
173. 20:38of the park obsidian glass 60 miles away reveals  that ash flows spread for miles around yellowstone
174. 20:47and thick layers of debris confirmed how  gigantic an explosion this must have been
175. 20:55the problem now is the explosive legacy  that the super volcano left behind
176. 21:00because a deadly danger still lurks  here hidden deep under the ground
177. 21:14for nearly a century after yellowstone national
178. 21:16park was established nobody  realized one astonishing fact
179. 21:23that the park is located inside one of  the biggest volcano craters on earth
180. 21:31it wasn't until the late 1960s that american  geophysicist robert christiansen realized
181. 21:37that rock formations he had been studying for  several years all around the edges of the park
182. 21:43in fact formed a giant circular ridge
183. 21:48he compared his findings on the ground with  a series of nasa pictures taken between 1966
184. 21:54and 1970 confirming that the ring was  the rim of a giant crater 45 miles across
185. 22:06parts of the crater rim are still clearly visible  today but the other edge is almost out of sight
186. 22:20finding the crater coincided with  another scientific discovery in a
187. 22:23totally different part of the country
188. 22:29in california scientists identified a strange thin  layer of ash buried underneath the modern day soil
189. 22:37the ash matched material from the yellowstone  crater dating the soil layers proved that the
190. 22:44ash arrived 640 000 years ago scientists at last  had a date for the yellowstone super eruption
191. 22:59ash was later found all over the western  u.s confirming the huge size of the eruption
192. 23:08at least 80 times the size of the 1883  explosion that destroyed the island of krakatoa
193. 23:23and 2500 times bigger than the  1980 eruption of mount saint helens
194. 23:34the almost unimaginable size of the yellowstone
195. 23:36blast means that scientists  now call it a super volcano
196. 23:46but that creates another mystery  in this peaceful landscape
197. 23:52where is the steaming hot crater that  the volcano must have left behind
198. 23:57today when you're looking out across the landscape  you see rolling hills and and trees so obviously
199. 24:04there's not a big hole left in the ground from  the eruption of the of the yellowstone volcano
200. 24:10so something else has happened one of the  first processes was in filling with all sorts
201. 24:16of volcanic lava flows and if you look just  down from the landscape toward those trees
202. 24:21you'll see one of the oldest lava flows that  happened after the 640 thousand year eruption
203. 24:30over hundreds of thousands of years this flow has  weathered into soil and been covered with trees
204. 24:39but elsewhere in the park are a  different type of lava deposit
205. 24:43still bear a vegetation because this lava was  still erupting up until about 100 000 years ago
206. 24:52the later lava was far less explosive  and more runny and cooled slowly
207. 25:00it smoothed the harsh volcanic landscape  into yellowstone's softer countryside
208. 25:12that made yellowstone at first more tranquil
209. 25:19but there's evidence here that the  land was soon buried once again
210. 25:23this time by freezing snow and ice the ice  that polish the rocks has a story to tell
211. 25:33it offers crucial evidence about volcanic  forces still shaping the park to this day
212. 25:43its tail unfolds through the tiniest of clues
213. 25:47scratches on the rocks reveal  which way the ice was moving
214. 25:54they show the glaciers always slid the same way
215. 25:58outwards and downwards from an  ice cap at the heart of the park
216. 26:04the only conclusion is that  something pushed up yellowstone park
217. 26:08so much higher than the surrounding  hills that glaciers formed on the top
218. 26:25but what force could possibly be powerful enough  to have raised yellowstone's peaks up into the air
219. 26:42the first clue to help answer that question  comes from yellowstone's numerous earthquakes
220. 26:48when the ground deforms it creaks and groans  like a stradivarius violin and the creeks and
221. 26:53groans are essentially earthquakes the quakes  are recorded by seismometers all over the park
222. 27:01the earthquake monitoring is a critical  part of the picture because it's basically
223. 27:05it's the stethoscope that we have to really  see and sense the heartbeat of the system
224. 27:18smith is investigating a  puzzling geological mystery
225. 27:25yellowstone has up to 5 000 earthquakes a year
226. 27:29even though it's in the stable heart  of the north american continent
227. 27:35scientists needed to know what was happening  underground to shake the park so much
228. 27:42to find out they plotted the precise locations  and depths of earthquakes under the ground
229. 27:54so why are there so many quakes
230. 28:01the answer had to wait until the mid-1980s
231. 28:04whenever more powerful computers first  let scientists see into the earth
232. 28:11seismic waves spreading out from earthquakes  travel rapidly through cold rock but slow down
233. 28:17when the rocks are hot the varying wave speeds  can be translated by computers into color 3d
234. 28:24images revealing exactly where hot rock lies  under the ground seismic waves propagate
235. 28:30through the earth just like x-rays go through a  body so we use the same physics to reconstruct
236. 28:37the structure of the geolo of the earth beneath  us the seismic waves have outlined the park's
237. 28:43underground structures revealing a graphic  history of what's happened under yellowstone
238. 28:51they reveal this gigantic reservoir of  molten rock which created yellowstone's
239. 28:56crater when lava erupted out and the ground  above collapsed into the space left behind
240. 29:04and the seismic waves still slow down under  yellowstone today showing that the magma
241. 29:10chamber still lurks under the park it's more than  30 miles long 25 miles wide and 10 miles in depth
242. 29:19but its size alters from year to year as  it fills or empties with semi-liquid rock
243. 29:24at an incredible 1500 degrees fahrenheit this  is the hidden beating heart of yellowstone park
244. 29:32the way it moves deforms the ground above  explaining the fault lines and the earthquakes
245. 29:38they produce and its heat ultimately powers all  of yellowstone's hot water pools and geysers
246. 29:52subterranean yellowstone is giving up its  secrets seismographs record thousands of
247. 29:58earthquakes in the park and the evidence of  earthquake waves reveals a massive magma chamber
248. 30:04miles under yellowstone's surface but the  yellowstone investigation is far from finished
249. 30:13because there's evidence of another even  more monstrous sized structure under the park
250. 30:30by the beginning of the 21st century scientists
251. 30:32investigating how yellowstone was made  had images of what lay under the park
252. 30:39but there was a problem technology only  allowed a view of a few miles below the surface
253. 30:47then as more and more data was fed into more and  more powerful computers there was a breakthrough
254. 30:55in april 2006 geologists published  new diagrams of hot structures
255. 31:00far deeper under the park and computers painted  more detailed pictures the results were startling
256. 31:12investigators saw for the first time the  sleeping monster that lies below yellowstone park
257. 31:22snaking down hundreds of miles into the earth
258. 31:26far deeper than the relatively shallow  magma chamber is a colossal volcanic pipe
259. 31:37nobody's certain how deep it goes but they  can picture it down to 400 miles or more
260. 31:44twice the distance between washington and new york
261. 31:52smith makes an educated guess about  what the underground plume is like our
262. 31:58best estimates now as we start doing the  physics and the dynamics of these things
263. 32:02it's like a conduit of melted rock like a chimney
264. 32:07that chimney called a hot spot pumped up  enough heat to melt the rocks of the crust
265. 32:12and fill the overlying magma chamber which then  erupted to blast out yellowstone's vast crater
266. 32:25understanding how the crater formed was  an important moment for the investigation
267. 32:33because there was evidence that similar  eruptions had happened before many times before
268. 32:51throughout the 1960s various teams of geologists  studied the snake river plain to the southwest
269. 32:57of yellowstone park and found traces of ancient  volcanic craters the crater rims had long been
270. 33:05eroded but their outlines were confirmed by  aerial pictures over the following decade
271. 33:14they ran in a straight line along the plane  heading for the heart of yellowstone park
272. 33:20on average each crater was a couple of  million years older than its neighbor
273. 33:26investigators realized that these are the  remnants of earlier supervolcano explosions
274. 33:32an unbroken chain stretching  far back into geological history
275. 33:42it seemed clear that time after time the  hot spot had blasted out a super eruption
276. 33:47and then moved on the hot spot appeared  to have traveled hundreds of miles
277. 33:56but that posed yet another riddle how could a hot  spot anchored to the core of the planet be moving
278. 34:14an important clue had been found in 1985  by american volcanologist william scott
279. 34:22he realized that plotting the  location of thirty thousand
280. 34:25earthquakes around yellowstone  produced an amazing pattern
281. 34:31the quakes traced out a giant v  v-shape on the surface of the earth
282. 34:38the v-shape wrapped around the hot spot's location
283. 34:42it seemed at first to confirm  that the hot spot was still moving
284. 34:47rippling up the land around it with fault  lines and tens of thousands of earthquakes
285. 34:58but the real answer lay with  the theory of plate tectonics
286. 35:02it showed that it's the american  continent not the hot spot that's moving
287. 35:10and the chain of craters on snake river  plain is there because for millions of years
288. 35:15the moving american continent has continually  pushed new land over the stationary hotspot
289. 35:23but as the north american plate moved across this  source of heat it pops through the lid and creates
290. 35:30the hot spot track that's the sink of a plane  yellowstone is just the active component today
291. 35:37the repeated hotspot explosions on land have  made yellowstone unique other hot spots have
292. 35:45been identified around the world like the one  that has created the island chain of hawaii
293. 35:51but yellowstone is the only place where a hot  spot has erupted in the middle of a continent
294. 36:00each of the earlier explosions blew the original  mountains to pieces then the land smoothed over
295. 36:08with later flows of more runny lava that was  released from deep under the earth's crust
296. 36:20multiple strands of evidence combined to  reveal yellowstone's slumbering monster
297. 36:25the gigantic hot spot plume lying under the park  earthquake maps show the hot spot's location
298. 36:34seismic waves reveal the depth of the plume
299. 36:39and earlier craters prove regular  super eruptions over millions of years
300. 36:45all of which leads to the most frightening  question of all when will yellowstone erupt again
301. 37:06measuring the amount and geographical  spread of ash fall from yellowstone
302. 37:10super eruptions produced some terrifying figures
303. 37:16640 000 years ago the eruption  poured out around 240 cubic miles
304. 37:22of material enough to bury the whole of  new york state tens of feet deep in ash
305. 37:30if it happens again thousands will die  and vast areas of the united states will
306. 37:36be buried in volcanic debris but  when will yellowstone erupt again
307. 37:47one clue to when that next eruption will happen  comes from investigating the eruptions of the past
308. 37:55the hotspot punches out a super  eruption on average every 600 000 years
309. 38:03and the last one was 640 000 years ago
310. 38:09but geologists expect that there will be  warning signs before yellowstone explodes again
311. 38:18volcanic eruptions are usually preceded  by an increasing number of earthquakes
312. 38:25the quakes are a sign that underground  volcanic chambers are filling with molten
313. 38:29rock and expanding to stretch  and deform the land up above
314. 38:43yellowstone park usually experiences an  average of 12 tiny earthquake tremors every day
315. 38:50most are too weak to be felt by tourists and  register only on the most sensitive seismometers
316. 38:57but in early 2009 more than four  times as many quakes started striking
317. 39:02every day over one 10-day period there  were more than 500 quakes some of them up
318. 39:09to magnitude 3.9 powerful enough to frighten  the visitors and put the scientists on alert
319. 39:16there's a second indicator of  increasing volcanic activity
320. 39:22if more molten rock does inflate the  underground chamber the ground above will rise
321. 39:32and that too seems to be happening right now
322. 39:39unusual evidence to prove it comes from an  unlikely source the waters of yellowstone lake
323. 39:48around 100 years ago small steamships carried  tourists on sightseeing trips across the lake
324. 39:54but one of the ships caught fire and sank  forever below the surface of the lake
325. 40:01but now yellowstone's astonishing geological  forces have resurrected the ship's remains
326. 40:06from their watery grave here we have  a boat which burnt down to water level
327. 40:13and so this tells us something  about the deformation of yellowstone
328. 40:19and basically what's happened is that the floor of  the lake has risen bringing the boat out of water
329. 40:28the reappearance of the wreck shows  that land under and around the lake
330. 40:32is rising because of the  expansion of the magma chamber
331. 40:39even more alarmingly the rate at which it's rising  seems to be increasing in geological terms a huge
332. 40:47area of yellowstone park is positively soaring  up into the air faster than it's ever done before
333. 41:03the biggest uplift of all has been recorded  just a few miles from the shore of the lake
334. 41:09there's a gps system here a much more  sophisticated version of the one in your car
335. 41:16it measures not only its surface position but also  its exact altitude to within fractions of an inch
336. 41:25there's a small radio antenna about the  size of your thumb that sits on top of this
337. 41:29steel rod and it's anchored in two to about three
338. 41:33or four feet so if the ground moves up  and down the antenna moves up and down
339. 41:39the gps and the land on which  it's anchored are moving upwards
340. 41:44we're above the magna chamber and beginning  in late 2006 this whole area of ground
341. 41:53started to rise at the order of two to three  inches per year and as of today this whole
342. 42:02system right here has risen about that much and  it's still moving today and so we're measuring
343. 42:08and keeping close track of the deformation of  the uplift that we're seeing at this station
344. 42:15but does the uplift mean that yellowstone's  super volcano is threatening to erupt
345. 42:20once again the question of what lies in  yellowstone's geologic future is fascinating and
346. 42:30i and all of my colleagues would love  to know the answer to that question
347. 42:36the scientists keep a careful  watch on the volcano's activity
348. 42:42the idea of science is to understand the process
349. 42:46and so we have a responsibility to see how  this system is deforming and how it's working
350. 42:51and we have to be aware there's still a  possibility of volcanic eruptions or earthquakes
351. 42:56after all that's what made this system and there's  no reason to think that vulcanism has stopped
352. 43:04the yellowstone investigation has shown  that the park's sleeping super volcano
353. 43:08is still alive and dangerous old faithful's  underground plumbing reveals volcanic heat
354. 43:16obsidian glass tells of a massive eruption  seismographs record thousands of earthquakes
355. 43:24while the earthquake waves reveal  terrifying underground chambers
356. 43:29and the reappearance of a sunken  boat shows that the land is rising
357. 43:35and yet the ultimate yellowstone  geological question remains to be answered
358. 43:41when will the super volcano erupt once again
359. 43:46we know there's enough magma left we know there's  enough heat we know that there will be future
360. 43:51eruptions in yellowstone but we don't know if  there will ever be another catastrophic eruption
361. 44:02so the investigation is left with a deadly serious  warning on the time scale that geologists work to
362. 44:11a coming super eruption in yellowstone may  well be right around the corner that corner
363. 44:17could be ten thousand or a hundred thousand  years in the future or it could be tomorrow
364. 44:24a new and devastating chapter in the  ever-changing story of how the earth was made
365. 44:51you