Prodigious degassing of a billion years of accumulated radiogenic helium at Yellowstone
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Abstract
Helium is used as a critical tracer throughout the Earth sciences, where its relatively simple isotopic systematics is used to trace degassing from the mantle, to date groundwater and to time the rise of continents1. The hydrothermal system at Yellowstone National Park is famous for its high helium-3/helium-4 isotope ratio, commonly cited as evidence for a deep mantle source for the Yellowstone hotspot2. However, much of the helium emitted from this region is actually radiogenic helium-4 produced within the crust by α-decay of uranium and thorium. Here we show, by combining gas emission rates with chemistry and isotopic analyses, that crustal helium-4 emission rates from Yellowstone exceed (by orders of magnitude) any conceivable rate of generation within the crust. It seems that helium has accumulated for (at least) many hundreds of millions of years in Archaean (more than 2.5 billion years old) cratonic rocks beneath Yellowstone, only to be liberated over the past two million years by intense crustal metamorphism induced by the Yellowstone hotspot. Our results demonstrate the extremes in variability of crustal helium efflux on geologic timescales and imply crustal-scale open-system behaviour of helium in tectonically and magmatically active regions.
Study Area
| Publication type | Article |
|---|---|
| Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
| Title | Prodigious degassing of a billion years of accumulated radiogenic helium at Yellowstone |
| Series title | Nature |
| DOI | 10.1038/nature12992 |
| Volume | 506 |
| Year Published | 2014 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Macmillan Publishers Limited |
| Contributing office(s) | Volcano Hazards Program, Volcano Science Center |
| Description | 4 p. |
| Larger Work Type | Article |
| Larger Work Subtype | Journal Article |
| Larger Work Title | Nature |
| First page | 355 |
| Last page | 358 |
| Country | United States |
| State | Wyoming |
| Other Geospatial | Yellowstone National Park |
| Online Only (Y/N) | N |
| Additional Online Files (Y/N) | N |
| Google Analytic Metrics | Metrics page |