2018 Summary: Economic Geyser

I’ve been a bit quiet here simply because I’ve been hammering away at photo processing this past week. In particular, I’ve been diving into the Sawmill Group, but those aren’t quite ready to go yet. But I do have the photos of Economic Geyser (and somewhat of East Economic) done for 2017 and 2018 and this blog post will focus on that.

ECONOMIC GEYSER SUMMARY SUMMER SEASONS 2017 and 2018

Location: Economic Geyser is located a bit farther down the Upper Geyser Basin from Grand Geyser. There are two pools there: Economic Geyser and East Economic Geyser. Economic is closer to the boardwalk and East Economic is closer to the trees.

Name info: Economic received its name in earlier days in the park (1920s). It’s nicknames were given were “Economy” and “Economical” before it became Economic Geyser. At that time it erupted frequently and the water fell back into the crater to be reused on the next eruption. It used the water economically.

While this was the behavior at that time, earlier years show reports of it overflowing and “filling a broad shallow channel and algae flat” before beginning eruptive behavior. [Walter Weed as reported in Lee Whittlesey’s Wonderland Nomenclature].

While that was in 1888, we saw intermittent overflow for most of 2018’s summer season. And that channel pretty much filled the flat area on many occasions. Since Economic Geyser already looked hot at the beginning of the season, I went back to process all the Economic photos from 2017 as well to find when this heating up started. The beginning of the 2017 summer season showed the beginnings of the overflow channel that hadn’t been used in quite some time. Briefly looking through photos, it appears that may have happened over the winter of 2015-16.

The current heating of Economic Geyser happened sometime in August or September 2017. Apparently, I didn’t take photos of it between 6 Aug 2017 and 26 Sept 2017. Yet again, the heating started on one side only as it has previously, making me wonder about the structure below ground. And I’m guessing that IF it were to resume frequent eruptive activity, it might need to have the other half heat up enough to kill the microbes.

For most of 2018, Economic Geyser visually remained virtually the same. It also behaved as a cyclic spring with times of overflow and times when the overflow stopped. I never caught a start or end of this, but it seemed the overflow periods were at least many hours long.  At times you could easily see convection over the vent in addition to the overflow. You can also see in these photos that East Economic has also been heating up as more and more chunks of the microbe mat are lifting. I have yet to go back and process all of those photos but will get to that this winter as I continue to work on my field journals.