West Thumb Geyser Basin Observations fall 2017
Yellowstone’s East Gate is set to open tomorrow morning and there are lots of interesting changes mentioned in reports I’m itching to see in person. But in today’s post, I want to share with you a couple of smaller observations of changes seen at West Thumb Geyser Basin last summer.
WEST THUMB GEYSER BASIN
Lakeside Spring – 2017
For much of the summer, I kept looking at the photos I had taken of Lakeside Spring and tried to identify what my intuition told me – something was different. I finally went back through photos and saw it. The back side was missing a good chunk of dirt. Apparently it was missing as early as 5 May 2016. There are still many photos to process, but in late summer 2016, the dirt was still there and must have collapsed over the winter.
This missing chunk was apparently over a vent, the same vent I witnessed a nice little quick splash from in 2015. All hot springs have the potential to become geysers, and Lakeside Spring is no different. Apparently, in addition to this back vent, bubbles also sometimes arise in a line, leading one to believe a crack lies along the front section of the main part of this pool.
Big Cone – 2017
Big Cone sits near the shoreline part of the boardwalk at West Thumb. For as long as I’ve documented this geyser basin, Big Cone has occasionally shown a seep coming through a crack in the cone. I started to more seriously document thermal features in 2005 and a photo from that year shows the seep. It only showed when the water level was quite near the top of the rim, but if the water level dropped an inch or two, no seep was seen.
As usual, the water level of the lake rises to cover or nearly cover this cone from the spring runoff. But the wave action in 2017 finally did in the section of the rim where the seep was – giving Big Cone a new path for its runoff channel. In 2016, a thoughtless visitor threw a chunk of geyserite at the cone and some of the rangers thought this was part of the cause for this chunk breaking away. While I’m sure that didn’t help keep that section in tact, I tend to think it was already well weakened by the seep that already made its way through.
BLACK POOL AND ABYSS POOL – 2017 and 2018
Access to West Thumb Geyser Basin should happen on May 11. A report on Facebook shows that a change may have taken place over the winter that affects both Black Pool and Abyss Pool. Last year, Abyss Pool heated up last summer, but in August, it started to cool down a bit. By October, it was clear that the energy was leaving that area. Even Black Pool seemed to have more of a greenish tint to it. On some of my last trips in, I started asking visitors to tell me what color they would say it was – and many said green, most said teal blue or teal green. So to learn it’s possibly turning back to match its name of Black Pool is not terribly surprising.
