[Geysers] Mammoth Hot Springs

[Moose, Allan E.]

There were two articles published in the April issue of Nature Physics that may be of interest to some geyser gazers. The first, and primary article, is "Watching Rock Grow" by John Veysey and Nigel Goldenfeld from  the physics department of the Universiy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The second, "Watch Your Step" by Oyvind Hammer form the Department of Physics of Geological Processes at the University of Oslo, is a short interpretative piece that places "Watching Rocks Grow" into the broader context of research involving the dissolution and deposition of travertine.

In "Watching Rocks Grow", Veysey and Goldenfeld describe their research in constructing and validating computer and mathematical models of the growth of the terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs. They compare the results from their modeling efforts with still camera photos taken from a carefully selected location (canary Springs) over a two year period. One of their fundamental findings was that the formation of pools in the terraces is a consistent process over all sizes of pools from the very small to the very large.

Here is a copy of the abstract of their paper:

"Nature abounds with beautiful and striking landscapes, but a comprehensive understanding of their forms requires examples where detailed comparisons can be made between theory and experiment. Geothermal hot springs produce some of the most rapidly changing terrestrial landscapes, with reported travertine (calcium carbonate) growth rates as high as 5 mm per day. Unlike most landscapes, the patterns of which are the result of erosion processes on timescales of millions of years, the hot-spring depositional landscapes exhibit a spectacular cascade of nested ponds and terraces, for which the origins and quantitative characterization have remained elusive. Here, we take advantage of this millionfold difference in geological timescale to present a novel combination of data from time-lapse photography, computer simulation and mathematical modelling that explains the emergence of the large-scale pond and terrace patterns, predicts and verifies the dynamics of their growth and shows that these patterns are scale invariant."


Allan Moose