Gaia
26th August 2011, 23:53
The researcher trying to find the caldera (The thing every volcano has that makes it a volcano) In Yellowstone couldn't find it for years. He kept searching and searching for it. It wasn't until US / NASA decided to send the park a nice high altitude photo they took of the place to test some spy photography that he found it. The entire park was the caldera.
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Totally-Psyched-for-the-Full-Rip-Nine.html?page=all
This is a great story, but I had to wonder if it's true. The USGS doesn't think so: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/faqssupervolc.html#NASA
Not according to Bob Christiansen. Bob is the USGS scientist who delineated the three Yellowstone calderas and told the world about the great eruptions that formed them. Bob reports that he traced out the caldera boundaries through old fashioned field work...
Walking around with a hammer and hand lens and looking carefully at the rocks and their distributions. Most of the key observations were made in the 1960s and 1970s. Several authors have written that these large calderas were discovered from space and we suspect that the rumor probably got started because initial field work that delineated them was partly funded by NASA. The idea was to compare well constrained geologic maps with images taken from space. So Bob's geologic map was used to verify the NASA images, not the other way around.
Gaia
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Totally-Psyched-for-the-Full-Rip-Nine.html?page=all
This is a great story, but I had to wonder if it's true. The USGS doesn't think so: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/faqssupervolc.html#NASA
Not according to Bob Christiansen. Bob is the USGS scientist who delineated the three Yellowstone calderas and told the world about the great eruptions that formed them. Bob reports that he traced out the caldera boundaries through old fashioned field work...
Walking around with a hammer and hand lens and looking carefully at the rocks and their distributions. Most of the key observations were made in the 1960s and 1970s. Several authors have written that these large calderas were discovered from space and we suspect that the rumor probably got started because initial field work that delineated them was partly funded by NASA. The idea was to compare well constrained geologic maps with images taken from space. So Bob's geologic map was used to verify the NASA images, not the other way around.
Gaia