[Geysers] Conduit dimensions - sources?

[Lynn Stephens]

The data I'm compiled may not be extensive enough for your purposes, but I did compiled a list of pool/tube depths from Allen & Day, and two reports in Yellowstone Nature Notes.  The compilation included descriptions of how the de[ths were determined.  The compilation was published in an issue of the Sput.  Since I don't have access to a complete collection of the Sputs, I sorry, but I don't have the reference to the specific month/year available.  Someone else may be able to provide that information for you.

 

Lynn Stephens
 
> From: brdavis at iusb.edu
> To: geysers at lists.wallawalla.edu
> Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 20:55:01 -0400
> Subject: [Geysers] Conduit dimensions - sources?
> 
> I've been reading through Rinehart's "Geyers and Geothermal Energy", and came across a rather unusual claim - that there was a thermister measurement in Old Faithful at a depth of 175 m (!!). I'm trying to get the original reference (a paper of Rinehart's from 1969), but it brought up a raft of other questions. Principally, what geysers and hot spring have been plumbed, and what is known about their physical dimensions of their conduit systems? What I've got so far:
> 
> Old Faithful: 22 m deep (or 175 m, if Rinehart is correct)
> Great Geysir: Top basin 16 m wide by 1 m deep, conduit below 3 m wide and 20 m deep.
> Lion: 24 m deep, with a 1" constriction at 10 m, water stands 5 m below the top.
> Great Fountain: 12 m deep and roughly 4 m by 6 m, fed from a small vent at the bottom.
> Sapphire Pool: about 10 m deep, diameter 8 m (pre-earthquake; source notes it's "bigger now", without specifics).
> Steamboat: NE vent 8.5 m deep with water 3.4 m below sill in SW vent, SW vent 25.9 m deep ("the greatest depth we have attained in a natural Yellowstone vent").
> Echinus: 3.4 m below the overflow level
> Cinder Pool: 9 m in diameter, 18.3 m deep is interface, with molten sulfur below that to 21.3 m depth.
> Grand Prismatic Spring: 75 m by 90 m, 49 m deep (but I don't have a primary source on this)
> Excelsior: (nothing yet, just discharge statistics)
> 
> I also have one reference that mentions when talking about Cinder Pool "“…at least 13 m (44 ft) of overlying water is necessary to provide the pressure required for temperatures of 120 °C to exist in a saturated water-steam system; less than 10 % of the vents probed in Yellowstone Park have such free vertical clearance, and of these, only Cinder Pool and Steamboat Geyser are in Norris Basin…". That suggests that they had a volume of data large enough to talk about statistics... but I don't know where.
> 
> Does anyone have other data? Other primary sources to look at? Other interesting tidbits about directly measured or inferred conduit geometries (thermal, seismic, or chemical)?
> 
> -- 
> Brian Davis
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