Yellowstone Earthquake! Magnitude 4.8 Shakes Super Volcano (Video)

Hot past

The Cody region was once called Colter’s Hell in memory of early explorer and trapper John Colter. He visited the region in the early 1800s after finishing a cross-country trek with two guys named Lewis and Clark. Colter noted the Cody-area geysers, hot springs and sulfurous smelling river and he told others. Back then the Shoshone River was known as the Stinkingwater or Stinking river for its sulfurous smell.

Over the ages, most of those hydrothermal features have subsided, although geyser cones, hot springs, sinkholes, a sulfur-permeated spring and an abandoned sulfur mine and mill still stand testament to the area’s more active past.

“We’re kind of in a lull compared to when John Colter was in this area,” said Jason Burkhardt, a Cody-based fisheries biologist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “There was substantially more geothermal activity that was occurring back then.”

Plume

Vanderhoff said he found out about the plume when a friend telephoned on Monday morning and joked that he had “proof positive” that the Yellowstone super volcano was about to blow. His friend said a fissure had opened up in the river and “we’re all about to die,”Vanderhoff recounted.

So Vanderhoff grabbed his camera and went to snap some photos. The vent was just behind the Best of the West store, down inside the narrow canyon that the Shoshone River has carved through the Chugwater geologic formation’s red stone. He said there was an old rock feature about the size of a bathtub with water gurgling out from four or five holes — “like jets in a Jacuzzi.” He said the plume appeared to have a “substance” like Jell-O since it didn’t break up.

“It was pretty impressive,” he said. “The river right there is a really dark green. With a polarizing filter it really popped out.”

Vanderhoff posted images of the vent and the yellowish plume it sent downstream on his Facebook page. The posting received 2,000 views, which Vanderhoff called “unprecedented” for his page.

By Wednesday, though, the venting had stopped, prompting Vanderhoff to call it a “transient geologic phenomenon.” Then on Friday the venting started again, so Vanderhoff grabbed his video camera this time.