イエローストーンの地熱が不安定のようです

NASA's Landsat finds problems under Yellowstone's Old  Faithful

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Nancy

By Nancy Houser

Dec 8, 2011 in Science

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By Nancy Houser.

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Yellowstone National Park -  NASA's Landsat satellites have

  been tracking Yellowstone's underground geothermal activity,

a deep heat that is  stored 4,000 miles into the earth's core.

But there are areas where these energy  levels are becoming

erratic. Old Faithful could be in trouble.

The Landsat Program is jointly managed by NASA and the U.S.

Geological Survey, beginning its services of remote sensing

in 1972. It became  part of the Yellowstone National Park's

new monitoring plan in 2005. In addition  to remote sensing,

Landsat also uses airborne reconnaissance in order to

"observe geothermal changes across all of Yellowstone in

a systematic and  scientific manner." (NASA)

Up until recently, the heat coming from  Yellowstone's

underground magma chamber has always been the fuel for

over 10,000  of the volcano's features: Old faithful, hot springs,

geysers, mud spots,  terraces and mud pots. But NASA is

reporting that the Landsat imagery has picked  up some

unexpected developments outside the park's borders, also

picked up by  energy companies beyond the park's borders.

"If that geothermal development outside  of the park begins,

we need to know whether that's going to cause Old Faithful

to suddenly stop spewing," says Rick Lawrence of Montana

State University.

The park had funded a study on the  unexpected geothermal

activity, looking for a new perspective on the developing 

event. The results will be presented in San Francisco,

Calif., on Friday, Dec 9,  2011, at the American Geophysical

Union conference. Visible light and  heat-sensitive Landsat

data channels were used in the study by Lawrence and his

co-author, Shannon Savage.

To get a better view of what was going  on in Yellowstone,

the Landsat satellites imagery were used in the study because

it was circling above the area at 438 miles, getting a much

better view of the  entire area. Additionally, the satellites had

several decades of data they could  use to observe the land's

surface and its heat energy.

NASA/National  Park Service

Minerva Terrace and Spring,  part of Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park.

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What makes Yellowstone unique is that the energy Landsat is  able to pick up includes not only the heat that has been absorbed through the  sun, but also the geothermal energy the earth produces by itself. The  satellite's imagery found that one of the geothermal spots, Minerva Terraces,  collapsed when the hot bubbling water beneath it stopped flowing. The images  that were observed from 1998 to 1999 showed that correlation of the heat and  energy in the area.

About the time this was going on, one  individual happened to see a geothermal explosion occur, causing rocks to fly  everywhere. But in areas where it was supposed to remain hot, the temperature  actually went down temporarily before coming back up.  (PhysOrg)

The Landsat satellite allows the  scientists to recognize big changes occurring in the geothermal area, like  Yellowstone. However, nobody knows what is happening or where due to the  satellite's large pixel size in its imagery. But clues are being found regarding  the interconnection of the underground geothermal events. The goal is to obtain  higher resolution in future thermal data. NASA's next Landsat satellite, the  Landsat Data Continuity Mission, will have a new thermal instrument on it for  use in 2013 to add to Yellowstone's geothermal record.

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以上は「ｄｉｇ　ｊｏｕｒｎａｌ」より

最近のイエローストーンでの地震も増加していますので地下で何らか

の変化が起きているものと思われます。噴火が近いのかもしれません。

現実に巨大噴火でも起きたら、世界の危機に直結です。　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　以上