A CAREER OF YELLOWSTONE RESEARCH AND DISCOVERIES

My earth science career began in 1956, before college, where I was a field assistant conducting studies of Yellowstone Lake. In our bathymetric data I noted undulating lake sediment structures that intrigued me first about Yellowstone’s geologic origin. It was also there that I began traveling Yellowstone’s wilderness following the trails of Washburn, Hayden, Jagger, etc. These experiences led me to an academic career at Utah State University for my geology BS and MS. During my junior year the deadly 1959 M7.3 Hebgen Lake MT earthquake occurred. I traveled there and observed the 6 m high fault scarp heard astonishing accounts of this huge earthquake but found relatives safe. Notably this earthquake turned me toward a geophysics career that was followed by military service conducting geophysics-geodetic surveys around the world and serving as the U.S. Exchange Scientist to the British Antarctic Survey. I completed a geophysics PhD at the University of Utah in 1967, initiating my formal Yellowstone studies including seismic, GPS, earthquake, volcano, etc. investigations. In 1973 revisiting Yellowstone Lake’s South Arm, I observed a buried shoreline and deduced that the lake had tilted southward in the not distant past. This observation began my crustal deformation studies that revealed an astonishing ~1 m of caldera uplift in just 60 years and the first account of magmatic fluid migration driving Yellowstone’s deformation. My career was broadened with visiting appointments at Columbia University, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Cambridge University. My 57 years of Yellowstone research has included very productive collaboration with NPS, USGS, and university colleagues, supervision of 70 graduate students 30 of which did theses on Yellowstone topics, publication of 110 papers alone on Yellowstone, giving hundreds of Yellowstone presentations around the world, recipient of numerous awards, and co-authoring a very popular Yellowstone geology book “Windows Into The Earth”. Importantly Yellowstone allowed me to bring quantitative skills into it as a wondrous outdoor laboratory with still exciting discoveries nearly every year. In conclusion I sincerely appreciate the support of my colleagues, students, the public, and my family to understand that Yellowstone is indeed a living, breathing, shaking volcano.