Coming full circle, The surprising relation between Kitsap Waterfalls and Yellowstone Geysers.

It's no secret that my two favorite things on this earth are Yellowstone's hydrothermal features and the Kitsap Peninsula's hidden waterfalls. One takes my attention during the summer, the other takes my attention during the wetter months of the year. Two separate geological features, nearly 900 miles apart, with seemingly no relation between them. Or so I thought...

I have just finished wrapping up my first week of classes here at Central Washington University, and am loving it. My classes are fascinating, my professors are great, and it's looking like the quarter is going to be one adventure after the other.

During on of my classes, "The Geology of the Pacific Northwest" this week we were discussing two of Washington's major geologic events. The Columbia River Basalts, that covered 40% of the state in up to 3 mile thick layers of lava rock. And the huge glacial floods that tore their way out of Montana and roared across the flat plateau of eastern Washington, all the way to the Pacific.

The origins of the Columbia River Basalts were 18 million years ago when the Yellowstone Hot Spot made it's first continental appearance, tearing massive calderas into what is now northwestern Nevada, southeastern Oregon, and Southwestern Idaho. For years I had thought that these first explosive eruptions were the birth of the Yellowstone Hot Spot. When I asked my professor this, he informed me that recently it had actually been suggested that the Yellowstone Hot Spot is much older, and has been erupting for longer than is commonly thought.

As it turns out, there are several studies which show the Yellowstone Hot Spot originating off the ancient west coast of the Pacific Northwest. For those of you who have been to my waterfall lecture, something should begin to feel eerily familiar about this....

As I explained in my lecture, 55-57 million years ago, some unknown force split the ancient Farallon Plate into several pieces and erupted a huge amount of basalt lava onto the seafloor. These basalts, today known as the "Crescent Formation," were slammed into the side of the North American Plate and stuck there, uplifting to become modern day Vancouver Island, part of the Oregon coast ranges, the eastern Olympic's, and the core of the Kitsap Peninsula. It is now believed that the "unknown force" was none other than the Yellowstone Hot Spot. That's right, the bedrock comprising Green and Gold Mountains, and the rest of the Blue Hills, the same bedrock that our beloved waterfalls crash over, probably originated from the geological feature which fuels Old Faithful, Beehive, and the other 1500 geysers in Yellowstone National Park.