Overview
About Yellowstone
Yellowstone National Park: Established in 1872, Yellowstone National Park is America's first national park. Located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, it is home to a large variety of wildlife including grizzly bears, wolves, bison, and elk. Preserved within Yellowstone National Park are Old Faithful and a collection of the world's most extraordinary geysers and hot springs, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.
Objective
The Noise Observatory for Imaging the Subsurface beneath Yellowstone aims to determine how the deep volcanic pluming pumps hot magma toward the surface. The mechanism responsible for pumping heat from great depths is ultimately responsible for 1) the Yellowstone hotsprings like Old Faithful, and 2) the mountains that rise to great elevations. NOISY is designed to utilize a new method of analysing the ambient seismic field rather than earthquakes. The coherent records of many ambient noise sources and microseismicity can be combined in such a way that they tell us information about the subsurface.
Broadband seismometers in this region will be able to image the subsurface structure, illuminating the dynamic sources magma. The Stanford Broadband Seismic Network seismometers are capable of detecting and recording seismic signals from earthquakes closeby (0-20 km) and very far away (all the way around the world).
Plan
We will place ~20 broadband seismometers in and around Katmai starting in Summer, 2008.