Maybe you know Yellowstone National Park’s iconic Old Faithful, which burns up to 180 feet in the air, receiving a push from the magma below heats and repels the water. You know it because scientists know that: By firing seismic waves into the earth and analyzing what bounces back, and by analyzing the chemistry of Old Faithful’s discharge, they were able to conjecture that it was a chamber of magma 3 miles deep is the driving force behind Yellowstone’s world-renowned attractions. But what exactly is the water beneath the tourist’s feet — the hydrothermal conduit system, as scientists call it — is doing so far remains a mystery.
“We don’t have any pictures of [the area] between surface and magma at all,” said Carol Finn, a research geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey. “So even though a lot of geochemistry is known, no one has ever seen a photograph of: How does the water flow? Where does it go? Where does it mix?”
Now, thanks to an 80-foot-diameter electromagnetic ring suspended below the helicopter, Finn and her colleagues have mapped the aqueduct beneath Yellowstone’s boiling geysers. Finn, the lead author of a paper The job description was published today in the magazine nature.
That loop in the air created an electromagnetic field, which in turn created an electric current in the ground, which was then sensed by the loop. “All of this combined can tell us how well electricity is conducted in the ground: It’s a poor conductor of dry rock, and a good conductor of wet rock or clay,” Finn said. ,” Finn said.
This allowed the researchers to map the composition of the Earth at a depth of a mile and a half, which you can see in the section above. (Red means dry material and blue means wet material.)
