[Geysers] Caldera Unrest

[Janet Chapple]

Jeff--

I knew I'd read about this recently, and tonight I came across one 
source (though maybe a different one). Surely more than one person 
noticed the flooding in the southern part of the lake.

Here is a quote from:

Prof. Robert Smith’s lecture to a Yellowstone staff audience. The 
entire talk is transcribed at:
http://www.nps.gov/yell/nature/sciencetalks/transcriptsmith.htm

(Title: Yellowstone: Plumes, Plums, Norris Disturbance, and Scoping the 
Earth.
Date: March 2004)

"In my GS-0 days (crowd laughs), in 1956 I was stationed at Peale 
Island and this is a picture taken off the veranda of Peale Island 
looking south toward Grouse Creek, and there was a boat dock there. 
That boat dock was out of water most of the summer, always was for me. 
Coming back in 1973 with Ken Dean, a biologist (he’s doing stomach 
sampling of trout), I was worried about the fact that all these trees 
were dying. A sinking shoreline inundates the trees. This was the key 
that says, “Hey guys, Yellowstone Lake is not what we think it is, it’s 
not static.”

"I got these pictures from Bill Romme just a year ago, and I went back 
and looked at areas around the southeast arm—here’s site one, and these 
trees had all been inundated and killed by 1983; here’s site 2, this is 
now an island and it used to be peninsula on the maps (these were taken 
in the fall); site 3 right here. He tells me there was a bout a half a 
meter of water or more that inundated these portions of the shoreline 
that he measured at the time, but he was doing other studies, and 
really didn’t make a big point of this until he saw my dock and he 
said, “Hey, here’s something that correlates. I’ve been looking at 
these same phenomenon from the standpoint of the sunken tree, or the 
fish being killed near the trees at the shoreline.”

"What happens is, if you take a water body here and lift it up on the 
north end, it’s going to tilt on the south end, and there are the trees 
that get inundated, something on the northwest side is lifting them up. 
This northwest side, of course, is essentially the caldera and we are 
looking at the effect of the bathtub ring."

------

On Mar 18, 2006, at 11:34 PM, jacross wrote:

> Some time ago, I remember hearing that the changing level of 
> Yellowstone Lake
> was first noted in the
> 1970's by a geologist who noticed that trees at the south end of the 
> lake were
> being flooded.
>
> My questions are:
>
> 1) Who noticed this?
> 2) Is their personal account of this observation written down anywhere?
>
> Jeff Cross
> jacross at lamar.colostate.edu
>
>
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> Geysers mailing list
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