Roaring Mountain (Yellowstone Monthly Update - May 2026)

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:05][music] >> Hear that? Yeah, Roaring Mountain doesn't make quite the noise that it used to, but it's still one of the hottest areas in all of Yellowstone National Park. Roaring Mountain is a bit north of Norris Geyser Basin, south of Mammoth Hot Springs, and in the 1890s, late 1800s, it was incredibly loud. You could hear it 4 miles away at Obsidian Cliff. It calmed down a bit, then in 1902 it got loud again. You could hear the steaming and hissing fumaroles for miles. Since 1902, it's been kind of quiet, but that doesn't mean it's calm.

[00:00:43]This is a very, very hot thermal area.

[00:00:45]Many of these features are at the boiling temperature and the ground is intensely hot. So hot, you can see this small thermal area easily from space.

[00:00:52]And it's not just about the hot ground.

[00:00:54]There's a number of hydrothermal explosion craters near here.

[00:00:57]Semi-Centennial Geyser, which exploded in 1922, is nearby. And up on the plateau, just above Roaring Mountain, there are several hydrothermal explosion craters. One of them sent ash a distance of about half a mile. So, Roaring Mountain, it may not be quite as loud as it used to be, still one of the most intensely hot thermal areas in all of Yellowstone.

[00:01:16]Well, that's the story from Roaring Mountain. Now, let's talk about geyser activity, deformation, and seismicity that occurred over the last month.

[00:01:24]It was another pretty average month in terms of seismicity in the Yellowstone region. The University of Utah seismograph stations located 97 earthquakes during the month. The largest was a magnitude 2.5 that was just to the north of Norris Geyser Basin, to the south of Mammoth Hot Springs. Otherwise, seismicity spread throughout the region, with much of it occurring in this band between Hebgen Lake and the north central part of Yellowstone National Park, as is pretty common.

[00:01:49]Turning now to ground deformation, this is vertical deformation at the Lake GPS site on the east side of the caldera. It spans 2 years. Each blue dot is 1 day of data. Downward trends are subsidence, and upward trends indicate uplift. Now, overall, we've seen subsidence since about 2015. That reverses in the summer months with a little bit of uplift due to changes in groundwater conditions.

[00:02:11]The summertime uplift really didn't turn over to subsidence in late 2025 or early 2026, as we might have expected. Then some winter storms that have sort of clouded the the view here, but there hasn't been a lot of net change over the last couple of months. So, it remains to be seen how caldera deformation might subtly be changing.

[00:02:30]Finally now looking at geyser activity, this is the temperature in the outflow channel of Steamboat Geyser, the tallest geyser in the world. All of these spikes indicate minor activity, so Steamboat may be gearing up for a major eruption sometime this summer. Echinus Geyser, which is a short distance away from Steamboat, erupted four times during the month of April, so it may also erupt a few times for visitors this summer. And then Black Diamond Pool, the site of a hydrothermal explosion back in July of 2024, remains active. There were two eruptions from Black Diamond Pool in April, on April 28th and April 29th. The April 29th event was the largest eruption that has been witnessed by monitoring equipment, the camera, acoustic monitoring, seismic monitoring, since all of that was installed in summer of 2025.

[00:03:18]Well, that's the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory update for this month. Now, remember, if you have any questions at all, feel free to email us. YVO webteam, all one word, at usgs.gov. [music] That's our email address. We will see you next month from another spot in Yellowstone. Until then, stay safe and stay healthy. Bye-bye.

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