Yellowstone Lake

The response of continental hydrothermal systems to tectonic, magmatic, and climatic forcing

This collaborative multidisciplinary project, funded by NSF’s Integrated Earth Systems (IES) program, runs from 2015-2019. Magmatic hydrothermal systems are critically important to the Earth’s thermal budget and geochemical cycles; are a primary source of economically important metal deposits; provide geothermal resources; support exotic thermophyllic ecosystems; and in some settings pose significant geological hazards. Multiphase and multi-component fluid flow in these systems responds to stress perturbations from tectonic, magmatic, and climatic processes on time scales from seconds to thousands of years in important, but poorly understood, ways. To understand how hydrothermal systems respond to geological and environmental forcing, we propose to conduct a unique, multidisciplinary field program in Yellowstone Lake, which hosts one of the most active hydrothermal systems on Earth. As evidenced by the numerous explosion craters, the thermal features on the lake floor are highly sensitive to thermal and stress perturbations. The MSU Paleoecology team, lead by Cathy Whitlock, will collect and analyze sediment cores Yellowstone Lake in order to better document the history of past hydrothermal activity, identify possible climate and hydrological triggers, and assess the long-term impact on the ecosystem. This information will complement subsurface studies of modern vents in the lake undertaken by other members of the project.