Study: Magma Rising Causing Uplift, Steamboat Geyser Activity

There has been a lot of thermal activity at Yellowstone National Park over the past several years and now scientists think they know why. They believe that magma rising is responsible for uplift in the park and new activity recently at Steamboat Geyser.

I first saw this study shared by Newsweek. It's based off of a USGS study published on Advancing Earth and Space Science journal. They wanted to get to the bottom of why there has been so much uplift at Yellowstone. In a nutshell, here's part of what they determined:

Modeling of Global Positioning System and interferometric synthetic aperture radar data suggests an evolving process of deep magma intrusion during 1996–2001 followed by volatile ascent and accumulation at shallow levels, perhaps as shallow as a few hundred meters depth.

They documented that this uplift continued until a 4.9 earthquake struck the region on March 30, 2014. After that, the ground began to sink again.

They also believe that this magma rising has caused the record activity of Steamboat Geyser which erupted 48 times in 2019 alone.

Does this mean the Yellowstone super-volcano is preparing to erupt? Scientists don't believe so. In the Newsweek article, they claim this activity is normal for a volcano system of this magnitude and is no cause for alarm.