[Geysers] Another Old Faithful scientific article

[Michael Goldberg]

The cover article in GSA Today (the monthly journal of the Geological 
Society of America) is "Model for the eruption of the Old Faithful geyser, 
Yellowstone National Park" by Kieran O'Hara and E.K. Esawi.

The magazine front page is here: http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/
and the article appears to be freely available for downloading.

At a quick glance, the article is concerned most with the recharge 
portion of the interval.  I didn't catch what aspect of observed 
temperature data is captured better by the authors' model versus much 
earlier work.  The length of preplay is then modeled as an independent 
random variable with Rayleigh distribution.  The mechanism for eruption 
initiation is just paraphrased from Kieffer (1989).

As a snap judgment, I think the treatment of preplay as a random event
(or sequence of random events) is the most believable part of the 
article.

I could also be totally wrong.  That's the beauty of snap judgments.

Either way, it's more light reading for the weekend...

Michael Goldberg
Michael.Goldberg at uc.edu