by Jessica Fujimori
We rolled along forest and mountain roads in a caravan of four white vans full of fifteen almost-freshmen, a few older students, a postdoc, and one daunting professor. He wore baggy jeans, a loose button-up shirt, a bushy gray beard, dark sunglasses with a blue tint, and a tan baseball-style hat that read “Earthtime.” He spoke in grunts and didn’t smile. He would become my advisor.
A girl in a blue sweatshirt and dark jeans sat next to me, her long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, with a pair of glasses that gave her a friendly, intelligent, and helpful look, like a librarian. She would become my best friend.
We made small talk that was only kind of awkward, two MIT prefrosh who were fans of classic rock and camping.
Then we entered Yellowstone.
The earth was steaming, in parts yellow and white and red, wet and dry and grainy. I stared at the ground beside the road; it was covered with a white substance that almost looked like frost or snow, but that wasn’t quite right. I leaned forward a bit towards the bear-professor sitting in the driver’s seat and asked what that white stuff was.
“Silicious sinter,” he grunted. “From the hot springs.”
“Silicious…so, is it salty?” I asked.
“That’s salacious. This is silicious,” he said. “Silica-rich.”
Silica-rich. I wondered what that meant.
From the more verbose geologists on the trip, I learned that the hot springs migrate, drying up in one place and forming new pools in another, leaving behind sculptured ground and frosty-looking silicious sinter. Their movement is unpredictable and uncontrollable; it depends on the flow of heat and water beneath the surface, deep and distant networks of underground chambers and streams and tunnels.
The source of heat migrates too, but over much longer timescales. 16.5 million years ago, the Yellowstone “hotspot,” a plume of heat from within the Earth, was located under what is now Nevada. Now, it’s beneath what would otherwise be considered the middle of nowhere on the border of Montana and Wyoming. As the continent moved over the hotspot, every few million years an eruption large enough to cover half the US would leave a giant basin where the earth sunk down to fill the empty magma chamber below. Those basins, or “calderas,” are the footprints that the Yellowstone supervolcano left behind, impressions on the Earth that have remained for tens of millions of years. And there I was, driving along inside a 2-million-year-old footprint — its most recent.
We drove by deep green forests and azure lakes, elk and bison, and though I gaped and exclaimed with everyone else, what drew my eye again and again were the cliff faces and rock formations. An upcoming cliff face had strange, block-y pillars carved into it. I exclaimed and turned to the bear-professor for an explanation.
“Columnar basalt,” he replied.
“Why does it look like that?”
“Has to do with the way the lava cools. Most efficient. Maximizes surface area.”
My eyes searched the dark cliff face. These columns were created from molten rock that spewed from the earth millions of years ago! That same molten rock was beneath the roads and tents and tourists in Yellowstone even now, powering that intricate network of forceful geysers, blurping mud pots, and steaming hot springs rainbow-colored from microbial colonies. All of it was connected, beneath the ground and across the millennia, in a complicated but fascinating way that I couldn’t grasp but wanted to. And on top of this ancient supervolcano there was little me, a nervous and excited freshman on the first of her MIT adventures.
I chose MIT for a few different reasons, and none of them involved geoscience. Though I was always a stronger humanities than science student, I felt drawn to the innovative, stimulating, and, well, nerdy culture of MIT. I wanted a challenge, a totally new experience; I wanted to learn about what I least understood. The sciences drew me in with their promise of endless questions, of the eternal search for understanding.
That trip to Yellowstone two years ago was the start of a new journey for me, a quest to understand the Earth in all of its complexity, from the immensity of a supervolcano to the minuteness of a microbe, from the billion-year to the hundred-year timescale. I couldn’t have predicted that my week in Yellowstone would change my dreams, that I would make close connections with the people I met, that the columns in the cliff would leave such an impression.
Life is like that; you can’t predict its changes, how the different forces in the world that somehow connect to you—people, events—will shape the course of your time on Earth, which springs will dry up and where new blue pools will begin to flow. You can’t know what kind of footprint you’ll leave behind and how long it will last. But if you stay open to change and connection, and if you go where your mind and heart draw you, you will be on the right journey.
Jessica Fujimori is an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology majoring in Science Writing and Earth Science. She is a contributing writer at the MIT News Office.