How to pronounce gehry in English (1 out of 3 results in 0.02 seconds)

Interviewer: Can you please spell your name. for me and explain your area of expertise?

Patrick Muffler: Okay, my name is Patrick. Muffler.

And the last name is M-U-F-F-L-E-R just like. what’s under a car.

It’s an old German name, and we traced it. back to about 1730 and I’m not going to

tell you what it means.

I’ve worked for the geological survey since. I was a freshman in college since 1955.

I started full time here in Menlo Park in. January of 1962 where I was affiliated with

the Alaskan geology branch where I was working. in Southeast Alaska where I was working with

3 other geologists.

I had a congenital hip problem and it got. worse in Alaska and so I got out of that kind

of boy scout work and was fortunate enough. to stumble into hot spring work with my mentor,

Don White, Donald E White whom you’ll be. hearing a lot about over the next day.

We got started working on the Salton Sea geothermal. system in southern California, and then kind

of out of the blue NASA decided they wanted. to use Yellowstone as a ground truth site

for a lot of their space exploration stuff.

They came to the geologic survey and provided. the geologic survey with then was a big hunk

of money and allowed a whole set of investigations. to develop up there, everything from geologic

mapping down to very detailed studies of the. hot spring areas.

And Don got immediately involved in that.

Bob Fournier had already worked in Yellowstone. consulting for the park service on barrel

spring and in doing silica solubility work. with Dr. Maury in Washington and Bob and Don

were kind of the nucleus and the leaders of. our group in Yellowstone and Alfred Truesdell

and I were the junior people out there trying. to find out what we could do that hadn’t

already been done by these geothermal gods.

So our first endeavor out here was mainly. the first year in 1965 when we basically went

up there, to get some geologic mapping in. a hot spring area, looked around, got a feel

for things.

And of course it was based what we did in. ’66 which was when the drilling camp started.

It was based on the wire line drilling that. don had done at steamboat springs in Nevada

which had been a very successful endeavor. looking at the physical properties in the

upper part of the hot spring systems.

Well our Yellowstone work was predicated upon. that example.

So we developed a two-year diamond-drilling. program up there which was really the cornerstone

of the work that we did in Yellowstone.

The cornerstone in the sense that it not only. provided us with accurate temperature and

pressure measurements in the upper part of. the hot spring systems but also provided us

with drill core looking at what the water. had actually done with the rocks and it provided

us with fluid samples that control temperatures. and pressures and a whole raft of other collateral

data that made the endeavor I think truly. unique and a real tribute to Don White’s

vision in leading and organizing it.

So was there any resistance to scientific. drilling then in Yellowstone?

I’m sure there must have been some.

We had great support from the park service. staff particularly John Good, the chief naturalist.

I don’t believe we ever had a written agreement. with Yellowstone.

I think that it was just word of mouth.

We had good support all around.

There were certain individual, certain district. rangers in the park who clearly had some reluctance

and most of it had to do with surface scars. and this was particularly the case at the

drill hole we drilled at sulphur caldron which. it was a really rainy spring.

We got the drill rig stuck in the mud.

We got the flatbed truck stuck in the mud. over at the next drill hole.

We had to winch them out and it left a heck. of a mess that upset at least one ranger.

But in terms of significant controversy, I. don’t recall any whatsoever.

Obviously right now, if we were to go in and. do that sort of drilling project in Yellowstone

writing the environmental impact statement. would be a century long process if that ever

happened.

Uh hum. I think we are just under everybody’s radar

screen at that time. Why was NASAs interested in Yellowstone?

I don’t really remember the details of the. analysis but fundamentally it was just they

were using Yellowstone as an example of what. they might find on some other planet at that

time.

And so they said okay were going to look at. it from space, see what we can see from space,

and then look at it on the ground and compare. the two and see how these two images, if you

will, merge.

What was the principle focus of your research?

I was focused entirely on the hydrothermal. systems although we did interact extensively

with Bob Christiansen in terms of the geologic. mapping particularly where it got in the hot

spring areas.

We actually found lava creek tuff first in. one of the drill holes in rabbit creek.

We didn’t know it existed in that part of. the world.

And that led to a very interesting interaction. between me and Don White.

Don came up and I said that, you know, we. found this ash-flow tuff in there” and that

I’d taken it down and showed Bob Christiansen. and he agreed that it was ash-flow tuff.

And Don said “ it couldn’t possibly be”. and this darned near lead blow that you know

he was just adamant that it couldn’t be. possible be ash flow tuff and it indeed turned

out to be everything worked out ok but it. wasn’t all sweetness and white.

What was the geologic understanding of Yellowstone. when you began working there?

It was only a few years before that Joe Boyd. had recognized that indeed it was a caldera

up there that basically was filled with rhyolites.

Nobody else had ever recognized this and of. course then Bob Christiansen went in there

and mapped it in detail and showed that not. only was there just one caldera, there are

actually three major calderas separated by. about 600,000 years between each one.

So our geologic knowledge of it was really. predicated on the work of very early surveys

that had been done, the Hayden surveys and. work a lot of work that Allen and Day did

on hot springs work.

But the first really modern geologic studies. were Joe Boyd’s and Bob Christiansen and

his colleagues.

And then the peripheral studies on the Paleozoic. rocks and Mesozoic rocks by people like Harry

Smeeds and Ed Rupple and a batch of others.

And then at the same time we had a group looking. very carefully at the glacial history of that

So it was quite a diverse group of USGS scientists. were involved.

I haven’t mentioned all of them by any means. and we were fortunate in being very well supported

by the management of the geological survey. at that time.

This mega project got exceptionally good support. all the way up and the real critical person

was a branch chief by the name Art Campbell. in Denver whom we didn’t work for but was

clearly an instrumental person in making the. work of people like Christensen and Rupple

and Smeeds possible.

Describe working with your colleagues on Yellowstone. topics

Well we had a lot of visitors up there.

We had people coming through all the time.

And in fact, as I go back through my field. notes I’m amazed that some of the people

that I actually showed around up there that. I had completely and totally forgotten.

We had a lot of interaction not only among. the four of us but we get down and stop in

and see Bob Christensen every time we could.

He’s always been kind of a geological god. to me, so it was always fun to go down and

see him and there was a, not a formal network. but you just made every opportunity you could

to talk to people.

I didn’t use to phone that much, a lot of. letters, back then it’s amazing how communication

and interaction was indeed by typewritten. letters.

Tell the story of the lava creek tuff and. your mentor Don White

Ok, well first of all the context of this.

This was a disagreement with Don but you do. have disagreements with your close colleagues.

And I want to be sure that I’m absolutely. explicit that Don White was my mentor.

He got me into geothermal energy.

He got me started on the Salton Sea area,. which was the first major thing I did in my

career.

He got me involved in Yellowstone.

He supported me in all of the subsequent work. I did in geothermal energy and without Don

White I would be lord knows where at the moment.

But this particular one that I was up there. on one of the drill holes and we found this

rock, which I thought was an ash-flow tuff. an ignimbrite if you will.

So I, knowing Christiansen was down at Flagg. ranch near at the Tetons’.

I drove down there with it and I showed it. to Chris and I said, “Chris I think this

ash ash-flow tuff and Chris said, ‘yes,. it is’.”

So we were quite excited about this because. of its structural position.

This was well within the major caldera there. and you think of a caldera as a subsidence

structure but to see the stuff that has subsided. somehow getting pushed up near the surface

was almost statistically impossible particularly. since it never is exposed at the surface there.

And that was the only exposure of this particular. rock that we yet ever found was in the drill

hole.

And so, we actually went in with Bob Christiansen. and we got a bunch of some rangers to go with

this and some workers from the Old Faithful. Inn to go into this area and blitz it in terms

of looking for ash flow tuff.

The reason we did it with the great huge group. of people is this country was just rife with

grizzly bears.

We were drilling at a dump and at that time. the dumps were just opened things sitting

in the park and the grizzly bears came in. every night and they slurped up all of the

garbage that came and, of course, you walked. around the area and it was just full of droppings

of blue plastic bags and glass, what have. you.

You could understand why the grizzly bears. were very unhappy people.

And so we went in there with bells and whistles. and everybody screaming and yelling to basically

try and be safe while we’re in there because. no way was either I or Bob Christiansen going

to map in there individually.

We would have been dead meat.

And so that was the resolve but we couldn’t. find.

And so, we left with this one occurrence in. the drill hole which is an improbable situation

but once we look at the whole drill hole carefully,. looked at the thin sections did the geography

on it there wasn’t any question.

It just was, you know, Don came up and he. didn’t believe it and he got very mad and

it blew over.

That was just life.

Why did NASA care about your hydrothermal. work?

Well Jake’s question was your question excuse. me was didn’t NASA pay for the drilling

and to my knowledge; they did pay for the. drilling.

They were interested in what was the nature. of the hydrothermal systems to understand

them such that if they saw certain things. at the surface of another planet they would

have some ideas as to what they meant other. than just at the very tuff surface.

Ant the other question was what did the survey. kick in to the salaries.

I would assume the survey just paid our salaries.

But I don’t know.

I was a very junior geologist at that time. and I didn’t worry about any of that bureaucratic

stuff. Was it exciting to work in Yellowstone?

Oh spectacularly exciting.

First of all, to visit not just as a tourist. which I had done before but to actually have

some raison d’être for doing things, looking. at hot springs, walking around with people

like Bob and Don, and learning what they did,. what they had done up there, what their knowledge

of hot springs was.

And of course Yellowstone is the premier hot. spring area of the world.

I mean any feature that you want to see in. a hot spring you’re going to see at Yellowstone

and a lot more that never occur anywhere else.

So it was you were just thrown into geology. heaven up there.

There were just so many things to do and look. at and out interest went in so many different

directions among the four of us.

We were not clones up there by any stretch. of the imagination that of course Bob and

Alfred were very much involved in the water. chemistry.

I got involved in the nature of rock alteration.

I got involved in the geophysics up there. working

something called AF-MAG which I couldn’t. tell you what it is anymore but we were trying

to look at the subsurface aspects of the hot. spring areas with detailed magnetic surveys

if you will.

It was a very exciting stimulating time and. we were going in 65 different directions.

How did the theories of plate tectonics developing. in the 60s affect your work at the time?

At that time it impacted it very, very little. because this was in the middle of the continent

and, if you will, people hadn’t really focused. on, for example, the track of the eastern

Snake River Plain to Yellowstone.

They were still busy looking at defining what. are subduction zones and spreading ridges

were in the major tectonic features and we. were just in the middle of the plate.

And plate tectonics really didn’t enter. much into our thinking.

Now Chris may have a very different answer. to that.

He may have been thinking about, “well,. you know, why do you have this major volcanic

anomaly sitting in the middle of a plate here?”

and that’s of course consumed people for. generations since.

But as far as I’m concerned, I was focused. on the hot spring phenomenon in the upper

few hundred feet below the surface.

Have you examined the question of hydrothermal. explosions in Yellowstone?

Well, I was aware of hydrothermal explosions. because Don White had studied a major hydrothermal

explosion at lake city in northeastern California. surprise valley.

I believe it was in 1955.

And basically, this innocuous hot spring area. in the middle of the night went up in the

air and scattered itself all over the landscape. and Don got up there a little while later

and wrote a very interesting paper in the. bulletin of the geological society of America

on that.

But that was kind of in the back of his mind,. and my mind when we went up there.

But then we started finding these crater-like. features in the hot springs area particularly

something called pocket basin which is in. lower geyser basin which is, oh, something

like three quarters of a mile in diameter,. half a mile by three quarters, I forget the

details.

And it turned out to make a long story short. that this turned out to be the classic hydrothermal

explosion feature.

Hydrothermal explosion feature meaning that. the upper part of a hot spring system that

is everywhere at the boiling point becomes. unstable for a variety of different reasons

and basically explodes.

No magmas involved.

Its not like there it’s not an explosion. like the phreato-magmatic explosions they

get in Hawaii.

This is just an inevitable happening in the. upper part of a hydrothermal system where

the temperatures along the boiling point curve. are increasing very rapidly with depth and

of course that creates a very unstable situation.

It turns out that we found a number of these. things that’s seemed to have happened at

about the time of deglaciation up there.

So we reasoned in a paper that Don and I and. Alfred wrote, we reasoned that basically well,

you had a very rapid decreasing pressure on. the hydrothermal system owing to the draining

of a lake impounded by glaciers by a jokulhlaup. if you will.

And the fact that the lake went from such. and such level to such and such a level down

here with the hot spring underneath it.

The hot spring at that time then became way. above the boiling point curve and simply exploded.

And this seems to have been a pervasive phenomenon. not only in the geyser basins but also over

at lake been worked on extensively by other. scientists subsequent to our work.

Well, we got involved in that and that was. probably the most interesting and exciting

paper I’ve ever written.

I mean, it was just you couldn’t wait to. come to work to work on that paper.

You were so excited about the nature of the. stuff you found and it was pretty new stuff

too.

And you could document a lot of it.

I men you could show that the fragments in. the hydrothermal explosion breccia were hydrothermally

altered rock.

They weren’t, you know, it all made sense. and it was great.

Then and Alfred did a lot of really neat analytical. work on it that built into it.

So that was the thing and of course that’s. led to an analysis currently going on.

Ok now what is the nature of the hazards at. Yellowstone?

And I think most of us would agree that one. of the more likely happenings are hydrothermal

explosions for various purposes.

Were you worried about pressure releases during. drilling?

You bet.

We had the experience of a guy by name of. Clarence Fenner from Carnegie institution

and they drilled several holes in the geyser. basins in 1929.

And wanting Yellowstone in particular, they. really had problems with and threes wonderful

pictures of here’s this old wood drilling. platform with just steam coming out all around

it.

And there’s a wonderful quote from Clarence. Fenner there that he was describing a particular

series of events where steam started coming. out and Fenner’s comment was “and the

driller became apprehensive.”

Well, that definitely got our attention and. we went in there with our eyes open that there

was a real potential.

We were drilling into systems which had the. potential of exploding both through the drilling

pipe itself but also if we didn’t case them. properly and didn’t drill the well properly

around the drill hole that was in the back. of our minds.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to write an. environmental impact statement but it’s

not like we were neglecting it.

And indeed we learned as we earned on this. one that we had a wonderful drilling crew

from Sprague and Henwood particularly a guy. by name of Max Kingsley and his helper Lem

Hanes.

And these guys just became absolute pros at. working at drilling in this high temperature

situations.

We developed equipment on the fly to be able. to, for example when you got a very high temperatures

and pressures, the water inside this water-cooled. drill rods, the water was over the boiling

temperature.

So if you had to add another rod to the drill. string, you basically had to erupt the water

out of the drill string, add the rod but you. didn’t want to have the water keep coming

up the drill bits, so we developed a one-way. valve that went in down there.

And I would say was fabricated on the fly.

We said we need this and either Sprague and. henwood would developed it or bob developed

it back here and there was all sorts of these. things and there’s, it became very routine

particularly drilling at the last Norris hole. where you expected the drill rods to produce

this spectacular eruption every time you pull. the core, every time you add a section of

rod, or every time you did anything.

Now, the really dicey one was at the second. hole we drilled where we found that the nipple,

the bit of pipe that attached the valve to. the casing had developed a crack in it.

I remember Don White down on his hands and. knees looking at that and finding that crack.

How do you fix that?

Basically what they designed was a wood plug. which they put on the drill string, put it

down, removed the valve, removed the offending. crack nipple, put a new nipple back on, put

the valve back on, and then pull the wood. plug and shut the valve.

I think I’ve got that right.

But that was regardless of the details of. that, it was an exciting business and when

we were drilling up there it wasn’t that. we just had the two drillers sitting up on

the rig.

We were up there horsing around the drill. pipe.

I mean, it was other duties as assigned commensurate. with abilities and if I’m not mistaken Bob

cracked a rib upon their hauling around drill. pipe at one time.

And of course Don White was up there, he had. a bad hip, I was up there, I had a bad hip.

And Alfred was up there with a bad ankle.

[laughter] it was really, but it was a very. effective team collaboration with the drillers.

There’s another guy Buddy Tony that was. involved also.

That was pretty darn exciting and very rewarding. for everybody concerned and ultimately very,

very successful.

Do you remember the first hole you drilled?

Oh yeah. Tell us about that

Oh, you bet.

It was the Y-1 out at whistle geyser in black. sand basin and I remembered drilling it and

I remember it was the first one where we were. in high temperatures and we learned a lot

and it was successful and we set up a water. sage recorder on whistle geyser which is right

next to it.

And we were able to demonstrate the effect. of the drilling on the geyser and it was a

good scientific project.

I remember in great part because it was very. snowy.

This was in April of 1967.

And I have a wonderful picture of the phone. booth at old faithful with the snow level

about 5 feet above the top of the phone booth. and I remember calling me wife in there and

she telling me that she had bought a house.

Why drill in April?

Well, because the placed that were very exposed. to tourists you wanted to drill in the very

early spring or late fall to the extent weather. it would allow you.

The last thing you wanted to do is to be drilling. at the whistler geyser or black sand basin

in the middle of summer.

It just would not have worked.

And even then, you still had a lot of interaction. with tourists so while we’re drilling in

the parking lot at Norris Geyser basin and. virtually one of us at all times was talking

to somebody who would stop and want to know. what we were doing.

It was an inevitable distraction of resources.

Did you look for magmatic evidence in drill. materials?

No, not the drill materials but in the materials. that were expelled from these craters.

The craters were obvious.

The question was were they related to a magmatic. event or were they strictly the explosion

of the upper part of a hydrothermal system?

And the default explanation would be magma.

So we looked very, very carefully for any. evidence of these and found none.

And most people were not aware of the fact. that boiling at the surface at Yellowstone

was say about 91 degrees Celsius but the boiling. temperature increases very, very quickly with

depth along the boiling point curve.

And that provides a mechanism for explosion. which most people, other than people like

Bob Fournier were simply not aware of.

In fact, I probably got that idea from Bob. and Don.

They were fully aware of the importance o. the boiling point curve in the upper part

of the hydrothermal systems and it was just. a step from that to visualized that as a mechanism

for this explosion.

And I fact, if you went back you probably. find it’s inherent in half a dozen papers

Don White wrote.

They’re very, very new things.

There’s a one little vignette about new. things that Alfred and I were so excited about

the fact that we found these big flats in. lower geyser basin were actually not alluvium

as some of our colleagues in math 10 or 15. years before but were actually nothing but

diatoms.

They were 10, 15, 18 feet of diatom mud.

And we thought this was a wonderful discovery.

It made sense all the high silica water coming. out the diatoms love to live there etc., etc.,

etc. and we had roughed out a paper we were. going to write then I had the brains to go

back and look at the literature and found. out that Harvey Walter Reed had actually published

that in 1868 or 1886 or something like that.

There’s very little that’s new under the. sun.

So the diatoms were in the hydrothermal system. or…

No, no, no, no.

The water is coming out of the hydrothermal. systems went over the silica terraces, they

evaporated if you will or deposited the hard. silica that makes up the geyser cones in the

silica terraces.

But then as the water cools, it drifts down. into these broad flats.

They’re called fountain flats in this particular. case.

And the diatoms love high-silica water.

The water is nice and cold by the time it. gets there.

It’s an absolutely ideal environment for. diatoms to flourish.

And they do.

Were there any epiphanies in studying Yellowstone?

Well, the light bulb obviously went off with. all of these with respect to the hydrothermal

explosion features.

I remember rather unimportant time when the. light bulb went off for me that we were talking

about what were going to be the dangers when. we moved on to drilling at Norris because

we were all concerned about drilling at Norris. because that’s where Fenner had had all

the problems.

So I would stand in a cabin at old faithful. and just reading Fenner’s stuff in great

detail, I finally tumbled some of the temperatures. and pressures that he recorded.

And I went charging over to Don’s cabin. and said “Don, do you realize what fenner’s

data shows here?” he says “yes” [laughter]. like you know “ok”.

He finally figured it out kid.

[laughter] so there was lots of epiphanies. of if you will greater lesser one of the real

epiphanies that developed to the whole thing. that Bob will talk about is how he and Alfred

were able to develop this number of techniques. to look at the chemical composition of waters

and predict what the reservoir temperature. was at depth.

Overall that was not so much an epiphany as. a development of knowledge that had tremendous

impact in the whole geothermal industry.

Describe some of your geothermal work. We were drilling in the very shallow areas

of geothermal systems.

We were not drilling at commercial geothermal. depths, say, 10,000 feet but we were drilling

and seeing phenomenon that could be extrapolated. to whatever depth you wanted.

And I guess what I would say is what really. the product here was this professional paper

that documented the temperature, pressure,. depth, relationships for these 13 drill holes

in at least three different geothermal environments.

You have the classic water systems of the. upper geyser basin.

You had the vapor-dominated system at sulfur. Calderon then you had the calcium-carbonate

system at mammoth.

And they all gave very different results but. the thing that I would say illustrates the

impact is we never got any static whatsoever. on this professional paper.

It was simply accepted, as this is what it. looks like in the upper part of high temperature

hydrothermal systems end of discussion.

Now, with the exception of Don White’s work. at steamboat springs in Nevada, very few other

areas in the world have had this sort of investigation. at shallow depths.

Most of the time, of course, in commercial. drilling, you’re trying to get through shallow

stuff just as fast as possible.

You want to get down to a thousand feet in. case, thank you, and then drill on to where

you’re going to get your production at depth.

So this was and is, I believe, a unique data. set that is comprehensively documented and

in particular documented not only in terms. o the physical parameters particularly temperature

and pressure which are measured very systematically.

But in terms of also studying the core that. came out of the wells that was studied extensively

by me, by Terry Keith, by Keith Barger, and. a variety of other people that came in and

worked on specific aspects of it.

And there were other spin offs that came off. of this but the real core of our results is

in that drilling professional paper I think.

Summarize the range of work that took place.

Overall this was a very comprehensive effort. of the USGS with the financial support from

NASA to develop a comprehensive understanding. of Yellowstone national park and vicinity.

And it encompassed not only the study of the. active process as these processes which we

were involved in primarily, but worked back. through the glacial history, through the volcanic

history, through the early volcanic history. of the Absoroka volcanoes and then into the

Paleozoic and Mesozoic stratigraphy and structure.

It was an effort to look at this elephant. from a variety of different sides and see

what it really looked like and that was the. context that came to us from NASA.

They obviously, although I never met any of. the program managers there, they obviously

looked at this from a very broad scientific. perspective.

They didn’t have any preconceived answer. that they wanted here.

They were interested that if they had the. opportunity to look at a Yellowstone on another

planet, how would they interpret what they. saw?

And they were smart enough to know that they. need to do more than just look at the hot

springs that they need to look at the whole. Yellowstone phenomenon if you will.

Now, of course, this just spawned a tremendous. amount of subsequent effort.

Much of which turned out to be geophysical.

The geophysical work took off when we developed. our geothermal research program in 1973.

And we put a lot of money into Yellowstone. as essentially a test bed.

I mean you try things where you know there. is hot water before you try it in some area

where you’re just looking for it.

And we tried a lot of geophysical techniques. up there some of which were successful, some

of which were an absolute bust.

And then pretty much the same time; Bob Smith. of the university of Utah had long time interest

in Yellowstone got involved in that in terms. of the seismology, in terms of the geodetic

studies.

We started finding out that the Yellowstone. caldera is indeed a living and breathing thing

that expands and collapses.

Our colleague Dan Dzurisin was very heavily. involved in there and there’s a lot of continuing

work.

And then the whole question when we go back. to plate tectonics is the fact that Yellowstone

is at the head of this path of calderas that. has come up the eastern snake river plain

over the last 15 million years with the head. of it, if you will, being at Yellowstone right

now.

In fact, being in the eastern part of Yellowstone. under the sour creek dome and Bob Smith has

done a lot of work trying to look at the geophysical. aspects of that part of Yellowstone east of

where I did any work at although bob has been. in there.

That trying to looking for evidence of magma. in there that we may be having another eruption,

I mean it would be reasonable to say that. if this melting anomaly has been marching

up the eastern snake river plain for 15 million. years that were not fortuitously here when

its stopping.

In other words, the chances are it’s going. to keep migrating to the northeast and the

question is when?

Now.

This is not a scare tactic, as we all know. that we’ve had three major caldera eruptions

in Yellowstone separated by 600,000 years.

So were not saying ok next week there’s. going to be a caldera eruption.

But I would be amazed over the next million. years if something pretty big didn’t happen

up there.

But that’s over the next million years.

How did this work draw attention to the hot. spot path leading up to Yellowstone?

This is one of the aspects that has evolved. from the initials studies up there that after

the studies that Bob Christiansen did at Yellowstone,. people started realizing that yes indeed the

Yellowstone was the youngest of a series of. calderas that had migrated off the eastern

snake river plain over the past 15 million. years.

And that the three youngest ones are actually. in the general Yellowstone area.

Well, it would be a little fortuitous if we. were living at the exact time when this particular

process decided to end.

So given the fact that the last three eruptions. of these calderas were separated by about

730,000 years, it would amaze me if sometime. within say the next million certainly 2 million

years, we didn’t have another eruption of. that sort of magnitude, but a million years

is a long time.

I don’t think I’m going to make it.

How did you and your colleagues communicate. your findings?

Ok you’re asking what kind of documentation. that we had.

Well, of course, I do have my field notebooks.

I’ve maintained them religiously as you. saw up here.

For the drilling logbooks and where we kept. very close records of everything we did with

the drill hole in terms of temperatures, pressures,. we we’ve pulled core, what the percentage

of core recovery was, and so on and so forth.

And those were essential in terms of both. writing the professional paper on the physical

results but also in terms of the studies we. did on the core themselves.

In terms of the bureaucracy of this if you. will, or the management much of that was probably

contained in typewritten letters that went. back and forth not between us particularly

but would be between say don and the management. back in Reston and I think most of those have

probably been lost in the dusty archives of. somewhere or other.

I still have a lot of the original geologic. maps we did at the geyser basins.

I have a magnificent orthophotograph of pocket. basin that I’ve never managed to finish.

I could spend not only the next 10 years but,. probably the next century finishing up stuff

from everything that’s lying around in this. office.

Describe Bob Christiansen’s Yellowstone. paper that was so eagerly anticipated

Well, it was where Bob was trying to tie everything. together in terms of the young volcanic geology

of Yellowstone national park and vicinity.

It was intended to be if you will like classic. professional paper, which dotted every I and

crossed every T. now, it did take a long time. to get out for a variety of reasons which

are really not important.

It is out and it is an absolutely classic. reference document for anyone that’s working

in Yellowstone.

Describe some of the hazards of working in. the park.

Well you’re asking thing that memories come. up.

One that comes up to me is the fact the grizzly. bears all around us when were drilling that

Y-5 in biscuit basin.

And you come out in the morning and you have. to repair your waterlines because the grizzlies

had chewed them.

And you’d be standing on the drill rig and. you’ll be seeing grizzly bears wandering

around oh 100 or 150 feet away from the drill. rig.

I mean this was a dump we were drilling in. and the grizzly bears basically were attracted

to the dump.

You got other interesting things.

I was looking down at the ground and trying. to follow whether it was a cane or a gravel

bench or till and looked up and 10 feet in. front of me was a big bull bison.

I looked there and I said “good evening.”

And I backed up and walked away.

If I were to walk 10 feet further, I would. have bumped noses with him and that could

be reasonably dangerous.

The only time we were really ever chased by. any animals was in elk birthing season.

And for a few days there, the female elk got. very, very aggressive about protecting the

new born.

And Alfred and I, no Mel Beeson and I had. some real problems with that one-day we just

happen to stumble into things when there was. some problems and they go way around to get

away from these guys.

Oh, what else?

I’m sure Bob and Chris will come up with. other things but you got to remember that

I’m working on memories now that are 43. years ago.

And a lot water has gone under the bridge. and its kind of hard to remember what some

of the details were other than the generalities.

It is clearly was an extremely exciting time. for all of us involved up there.

We were really very privileged to have this. opportunity.

END