Yellowstone explosions, supervolcanoes, and our culture’s apocalyptic hunger

Interpreting the allure of last week's Biscuit Basin surprise

The explosion in a Yellowstone thermal basin destroyed a boardwalk (National Park Service photo by Jacob W. Frank)

When a hotpool exploded last week in Yellowstone National Park, I found it wondrous. I was glad that nobody was hurt, and grateful that somebody had captured close-up video. This sort of extraordinary natural phenomenon is exactly why we have set the region aside as a national park. Because it was amazing, fascinating, unexpected-but-in-retrospect-predictable, and just downright cool.

I forgot how some people would see it as apocalyptic.

The facts: The National Park Service calls the event a “hydrothermal explosion.” At Black Diamond Pool in Biscuit Basin, just before 10 a.m. on July 23, water turned into steam, the way it does several times a day at the Old Faithful geyser. But because it’s not a regular event at this pool, the steam didn’t escape in a pretty, clear column. It blasted through debris, black mud, and “grapefruit-sized rocks,” ejecting them up to hundreds of feet away.

This is the geology—hot water close to the earth’s surface—that makes Yellowstone unique. These sorts of explosions probably happen once a year or so, somewhere in the park. But they’re often on a smaller scale and usually in the backcountry where nobody is there to witness them.

Because I knew this science fairly well, from writing my 2017 book Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon, my curiosity quickly turned to the social/cultural dynamics of the event. I pondered the old “If a tree falls in the forest” argument: how much more newsworthy this event was because it happened in a developed area.

I was impressed at how technology, in the form of smartphones and social media, allowed the news to be disseminated so quickly. And with so much drama and emotion: even just a decade ago, we might have learned about this event through interviews with witnesses, words on a page. To see it happen on video is to be brought face-to-face with the “sublime” (a sense of awe-tinged powerlessness in nature) that so dominated 19th-century discussions of Yellowstone.

I was also intrigued by the interplay between nature and danger. In the aftermath, the Park Service has closed Biscuit Basin for the rest of the summer, “for visitor safety.” I’m sure that’s wise. We don’t want to send tourists closer to danger, and there are plenty of similar thermal features nearby. Yet that danger is also making this site more enticing. Do tourists value nature because it’s beautiful, educational, spiritual, and life-giving—or are we especially drawn to that which might harm us?

A few days after the explosion, an automated email reminded me of its most important cultural implication—one I’d almost forgotten, even though it featured prominently in Wonderlandscape. For many people, Yellowstone is primarily a supervolcano. They thus necessarily measure any event in terms of how much closer it brings us to that apocalypse.

That’s why the first sentence of the Park Service’s press release noted that the explosion “was not caused by volcanic activity.” Officials have constantly repeated and highlighted that theme: the supervolcano is not about to erupt, this is standard geological behavior, all other indicators are normal. There is no reason to panic.

These supervolcano discussions always take me by surprise. That’s in part because I trust the scientists who say that an imminent major eruption is extremely unlikely. And in part because I find Yellowstone such an incredible natural story for so many other reasons—geysers, wildlife, mountains, canyons, architecture, art, history, and more—that to see it as a potential junior version of nuclear holocaust seems remarkably un-creative, even tawdry.

To help me bridge that gap, since my book came out, I’ve had a weekly Google alert to tell me about media coverage involving the words “Yellowstone” and “supervolcano.” Some of the stories simply note its existence, a geological fact. Many center on asking, “What would happen if the supervolcano blows?”, a provocative question that’s hard for scientists to answer definitively, which makes it an evergreen story for a slow news day. Too few stories center on actual scientific news from Yellowstone’s official Volcano Observatory, and too many on conspiracy-minded roundups of other fun ways for the world to end. (Climate change! Killer robots! Asteroids! But couldn’t we have more explosions?)

This week, my alert had stories on the (lack of) connection between the Biscuit Basin explosion and the supervolcano, and I remembered the insight I gained while writing the book. We experience Yellowstone—like any place, like all of nature—through a cultural lens. We may think of Yellowstone as a wholly natural place, but what’s even more amazing is how it always reflects our culture.

A culture ready to see the frontier as beautiful rather than dangerous was what celebrated Thomas Moran’s painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. A culture that cherished democracy was what created the world’s first national park. A culture nostalgic about log cabins was what built the world’s largest and called it the Old Faithful Inn. A culture that denigrated Indigenous people was what tried to erase them from the park’s history.

Today, a culture that spends ridiculous amounts of time thinking about a zombie apocalypse and/or the Book of Revelation interprets every Yellowstone event through an allegedly impending supervolcanic eruption. Tomorrow, we can hope, the culture will move on. At that point Yellowstone, while remaining an unparalleled natural wonder, will take on a new cultural meaning.

Discussion:

• Wonderlandscape goes into these issues in depth, especially in the Epilogue. If you buy it from my page on bookshop.org, I get a slight commission. But please instead feel free to support your local independent bookstore!