[Geysers] Fan and Mortar history

[Carlton Cross]

One response is, Why not?  It's fun, it creates an historical record, 
it creates stories for the next generation, and a person who has read 
the behavioral descriptions knows better how to invest time to see 
eruptions.  It's pretty clear that the people who have paid the most 
attention to behavior patterns have seen the most eruptions.

Scientifically, it's purely observation mostly beyond explanation, 
but, every once in a while, a pattern shows up or geysers separated 
by some distance can be shown to have related behavior.  I'd guess it 
has almost no predictive value for even ten or twenty years from now.

The USGS (or maybe the NPS) monitors the river outflows from the Park 
and then derives an estimate of the total thermal output.  These data 
show a significant decreasing trend in total thermal activity.  Over 
a long enough period of time, the geyser activity data will probably 
correlate pretty well with the trend of the total thermal output.  If 
you don't have the data on record, you'll never notice any correlations.

Carlton Cross


At 11:46 AM 12/21/2011, you wrote:
>Hi Tara, Michael, and all you gazers,
>
>    I have read a few of your logs and blogs about F&M and a question that
>comes to me is:  Over the history of the past 650,000 years and the volcanic
>activity of Yellowstone Park area, and the eons of time ahead of us, of what
>importance is the 10, 15, 25 years of sparatic activity and history of one
>geyser got to do with our knowledge or understanding of the region?  Other
>than collecting and applying statistics to the historical data, will you,
>with what probability, be able to predict the activity over the next 1, 5, 10
>years or more?  What is the destination or goal of your study?
>
>     I love Yellowstone Park, the geyser activity, the wildlife, the beauty
>of the entire region.  I have visited the Park over 200 times in my fifty
>plus years of "going to Yellowstone", follow the earthquake activity, winter
>snow fall, webcams, etc., but can't for the life of me figure out why the
>efforts that are put into tracking one F&M geyser?
>
>    I would like to obtain more information as to the knowledge that is hope
>to gain from all of this data?
>
>    Gary Henderson - Meridian, Idaho</HTML>
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