Characterization and evolution of fractures in low-volume pahoehoe lava flows, eastern Snake River Plain, Idaho

2004 ◽  
Vol 116 (3) ◽  
pp. 322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conrad J. Schaefer ◽  
Simon A. Kattenhorn
Keyword(s):  
Lava Flows ◽  
Snake River Plain ◽  
Snake River ◽  
Low Volume ◽  
River Plain

In the Wake of the Yellowstone Hotspot

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Smith ◽  
Lee J. Siegel
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
Lava Flows ◽  
Snake River Plain ◽  
Snake River ◽  
Earthquake Activity ◽  
Basalt Lava ◽  
Mountain Ranges ◽  
Yellowstone Hotspot ◽  
A Chain ◽  
River Plain

Anyone who drives through southern Idaho on Interstates 84 or 15 must endure hours and hundreds of miles of monotonous scenery: the vast, flat landscape of the Snake River Plain. In many areas, sagebrush and solidified basalt lava flows extend toward distant mountain ranges, while in other places, farmers have cultivated large expanses of volcanic soil to grow Idaho’s famous potatoes. Southern Idaho’s topography was not always so dull. Mountain ranges once ran through the region. Thanks to the Yellowstone hotspot, however, the pre-existing scenery was destroyed by several dozen of the largest kind of volcanic eruption on Earth—eruptions that formed gigantic craters, known as calderas, measuring a few tens of miles wide. Some 16.5 million years ago, the hotspot was beneath the area where Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho meet. It produced its first big caldera-forming eruptions there. As the North American plate of Earth’s surface drifted southwest over the hotspot, about 100 giant eruptions punched through the drifting plate, forming a chain of giant calderas stretching almost coo miles from the Oregon—Nevada—Idaho border, northeast across Idaho to Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming. Yellowstone has been perched atop the hotspot for the past 2 million years, and a 45-by-30-mile-wide caldera now forms the heart of the national park. After the ancient landscape of southern and eastern Idaho was obliterated by the eruptions, the swath of calderas in the hotspot’s wake formed the eastern two-thirds of the vast, 50-mile-wide valley now known as the Snake River Plain. The calderas eventually were buried by basalt lava flows and sediments from the Snake River and its tributaries, concealing the incredibly violent volcanic history of the Yellowstone hotspot. Yet we now know that the hotspot created much of the flat expanse of the Snake River Plain. Like a boat speeding through water and creating an arc-shaped wave in its wake, the hotspot also left in its wake a parabola-shaped pattern of high mountains and earthquake activity flanking both sides of the Snake River Plain.

Radiocarbon Studies of Latest Pleistocene and Holocene Lava Flows of the Snake River Plain, Idaho: Data, Lessons, Interpretations

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mel A. Kuntz ◽  
Elliott C. Spiker ◽  
Meyer Rubin ◽  
Duane E. Champion ◽  
Richard H. Lefebvre
Keyword(s):  
Recurrence Interval ◽  
Lava Flows ◽  
Snake River Plain ◽  
Snake River ◽  
Basaltic Lava ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Lava Field ◽  
River Plain

Latest Pleistocene-Holocene basaltic lava fields of the Snake River Plain, Idaho, have been dated by the radiocarbon method. Backhoe excavations beneath lava flows typically yielded carbon-bearing, charred eolian sediment. This material provided most of the samples for this study; the sediment typically contains less than 0.2% carbon. Charcoal fragments were obtained from tree molds but only from a few backhoe excavations. Contamination of the charred sediments and charcoal by younger carbon components is extensive; the effects of contamination were mitigated but appropriate pretreatment of samples using acid and alkali leaches. Twenty of the more than 60 lava flows of the Craters of the Moon lava field have been dated; their ages range from about 15,000 to about 2000 yr B.P. The ages permit assignment of the flows to eight distinct eruptive periods with an average recurrence interval of about 2000 yr. The seven other latest Pleistocene-Holocene lava fields were all emplaced in short eruptive bursts. Their 14C ages (yr B.P.) are: Kings Bowl (2222± 100), Wapi (2270 ± 50), Hells Half Acre (5200 ± 150), Shoshone (10,130 ± 350), North Robbers and South Robbers (11.980 ± 300), and Cerro Grande (13,380 ± 350).

Assessing the accuracy of thermoluminescence for dating baked sediments beneath late Quaternary lava flows, Snake River Plain, Idaho

1994 ◽  
Vol 99 (B8) ◽  
pp. 15569 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven L. Forman ◽  
James Pierson ◽  
R. P. Smith ◽  
W. R. Hackett ◽  
G. Valentine
Keyword(s):  
Late Quaternary ◽  
Lava Flows ◽  
Snake River Plain ◽  
Snake River ◽  
River Plain
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