Yellowstone

The Yellowstone River as it runs through the park.

Gneiss, tuff and a little wacke Geology

Know your schist

Paleocene British Isles Asbestos Geomagnetism Fossil Cambrian Iron Diamond

Rock stars

Ian Plimer Farouk El-Baz Kurt Wise Emil Silvestru v - t - e

The Yellowstone National Park is a protected area located primarily in the U.S. state of Wyoming, but also extending into Montana and Idaho as well,^[1] and was the first area in the U.S. that was so honored as a national park.^[2] Its name derives from the Yellowstone River that runs through the park, which itself was named after the yellow sandstones on its banks in Montana.^[3] Yellowstone is known for its wildlife, environment, and landmarks, in particular the Old Faithful geyser, which goes off every ninety minutes or so.^[4] Yellowstone also contains a number of archaeological sites, with settlement of the region dating back to the Clovis culture 11,000 years ago.^[5] More infamously, Yellowstone is the site of the Yellowstone Caldera, a supervolcano that has gone off three times in history and which some claim may destroy America at any moment now. Despite its rich geological history, many Young-Earth creationists have tried to use Yellowstone as "evidence" of the Global Flood. Yellowstone is also the subject of an interesting constitutional thought experiment that alleges that it may be possible to get away with any crime, including murder, there.

Will the volcano one day destroy us all?[edit]

Map showing the previous calderas created by the Yellowstone hotspot.

Most likely, no, despite what all the fearmongerers will tell you.^[6] In fact, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) ranks Yellowstone as only the twenty-first most dangerous volcano in the United States.^[7] So what's with all the fearmongering?

Yellowstone is one of the largest active calderas in the world, though there are others of a similar size, most notably the Toba volcano in Indonesia, which went off 75,000 years ago and is believed to have caused a population bottleneck of the human population.^[8] Yellowstone's magma chamber is about 3,200km² across and 8km to 16km deep, but only about 10-30% of the rock is actually molten.^[9] If the magma chamber started filling again, there would be a lot of seismic activity, ground deformation and changes in gas emissions; Yellowstone is one of the most monitored volcanoes in the world, and since it would take decades for the magma chamber to fill up enough to become a threat, we'd know of any dangers years in advance.^[10]

Yellowstone has erupted three times in geologically-recent times: 2.1 Ma (which was the largest of the three, being 6,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mt. Saint Helens), 1.2 Ma (700 times larger than Mt. Saint Helens) and most recently 640,000 years ago, being the source of the current caldera (2,500 times larger than Mt. Saint Helens).^[11] Some make the claim that this means we're overdue for an eruption, but since there were 900,000 years between the first two eruptions, this kind of extrapolation is fallacious.

Yellowstone sits on a hotspot, which is an area that has volcanism outside of a plate boundary. As the North American Plate moves over the asthenosphere, the hotspot remains in place, so the eruptions from the hotspot can track the plate motion^[12] — and there are old calderas that were left by the hotspot that can be found as far away as Nevada.^[13] Due to plate motion, the caldera is moving away from the hotspot, and as a result if Yellowstone does erupt again during our lifetime, it would almost certainly be a small-scale lava flow rather than a cataclysmic event.^[14]

Hydrothermal explosions[edit]

Geologic map of the Lake Yellowstone area, red marks are hydrothermal vents, the red area in the northeast is Mary Bay

The more immediate geologic dangers in Yellowstone are hydrothermal explosions that require no magma at all to explode. Hydrothermal explosions can occur when superheated pressurized water is contained under a naturally-formed rock dome. When the dome cracks or breaks, such as from an earthquake, the water is released suddenly and violently, which can send refrigerator sized boulders up to 2km into the air and up to 20km away. One such explosion at Mount Ontake, Japan killed 58 people from falling rocks. Yellowstone's hydrothermal domes are located in and near Lake Yellowstone, and its largest such dome, Mary Bay, exploded most recently in 1860. Mary Bay has exploded with a force of 100-400 times that of the Ontake explosion. Unlike volcanic explosions, hydrothermal explosions give very little pre-explosion warnings.^[15]

Young-Earth creationist perspective[edit]

A petrified forest on Specimen Ridge.

Yellowstone's geological history is fairly well-understood, especially since the major geological events that shaped it have happened relatively recently. Nevertheless, there are a few young-Earth creationists who believe that the park is evidence that the Earth is only 6,000 or so years old. For example, Answers in Genesis alleges that Yellowstone shows evidence of how large volcanoes changed the Earth's surface after the Global Flood.^[16] Never mind that the most recent eruption happened 645,000 years ago, over one hundred times longer than they think the Earth was around, but they try to get around this by saying that since the ground is still hot, the volcano must have erupted 4,500 years ago — which is still ridiculous, considering that there are archaeological sites in Yellowstone that are much older than that and aren't covered in ash.^[5] This also ignores the aforementioned fact that not enough of the caldera is molten for there to be a large-scale eruption, and also completely overlooks all the past calderas that were created by the hotspot.

One particular challenge for creationists is the petrified forests at Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone, of which many of them have spent decades trying to come up with a coherent explanation for. There are 27 successive layers of petrified forests which were buried under volcanic ash (in volcanic events that are unrelated to the current hotspot) 50 million years ago, and they show a variety of species of trees.^[17] Their answer is, unsurprisingly, Flooddidit.^[18] Some genius arguments:

• "But the trees don't have clear roots!" — The vast majority of petrified trees don't have preserved root systems, as trees tend to be stripped from their roots as they are displaced by the event that leads to petrification. In fact, the first petrified tree with an intact root system was only found in 2021.^[19]
• "But there are no animal fossils!" — The very reason why they petrify is because there are no living organisms with the trees to cause them to decay, so obviously, no animal fossils would be found in petrified forests.^[20]
• "But the trees look like they've moved, which obviously means there was a flood!" — Displacement is an important part of how petrified trees form, as they need to be under layers of mud or volcanic ash to petrify. Guess what lava flows can do?^[21]

Can you get away with murder in Yellowstone?[edit]

Brian Kalt, a law professor from Michigan State University, came up with a famous constitutional thought experiment in a 2005 Georgetown Law Journal article titled "The Perfect Crime".^[22] Under the Sixth Amendment, everyone has the right to a trial with a jury that comprises people from both the state and federal district in which the crime was committed. A problem arises when the entirety of Yellowstone is placed within the federal district of Wyoming, even the parts in Montana and Idaho.^[23] This isn't a big deal for the parts in Montana, as people live there and can thus be called to the jury (although the population is so small that assembling a jury would still be difficult). But nobody lives in the part of Yellowstone that is in Idaho, and thus if a crime is committed there, theoretically there can be no jury and thus, no trial, creating a 50-square mile "Zone of Death" in the Idaho part of Yellowstone where, theoretically, one can get away with any crime.^[24] This loophole has yet to be seriously tested in a court of law, so we wouldn't recommend trying it out, but nevertheless Kalt has been trying to get the government to close the loophole by making the Idaho part of Yellowstone part of the federal district of Idaho.^[25]

See also[edit]

• Grand Canyon — another national park that creationists have been trying to shoehorn into their flood bullshit

References[edit]