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Prodigious degassing of a billion years of accumulated radiogenic helium at Yellowstone

Nature volume 506, pages 355–358 (2014)Cite this article

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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.

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Figure 1: Map of Yellowstone.
Figure 2: Concentration and isotope ratios for Yellowstone gases.
Figure 3: Crustal versus mantle 4He flux based on ref. 7.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Ingebritsen for a review. C. Hendrix, S. Gunther, H. Heasler and D. Mahony assisted with field planning and logistics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, 94025, California, USA

    J. B. Lowenstern, W. C. Evans & D. Bergfeld

  2. US Geological Survey, Denver, 80225, Colorado, USA

    A. G. Hunt

Authors
  1. J. B. Lowenstern
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  2. W. C. Evans
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  3. D. Bergfeld
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  4. A. G. Hunt
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Contributions

J.B.L. and D.B. together led the sampling program at Yellowstone. W.C.E. participated in the fieldwork. D.B. did all laboratory analyses except the noble-gas analyses. D.B. also led the diffuse degassing fieldwork at Brimstone Basin and Heart Lake. A.G.H. performed the noble-gas analyses. J.B.L. first recognized the significance of the He emission rates for crustal degassing and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. W.C.E. provided considerable input on gas geochemistry and noble-gas systematics, and assisted with subsequent drafts. All authors edited later versions of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to J. B. Lowenstern.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Figure 1 Box plot with distribution shape for Rc/Ra values from 83 locations in Yellowstone National Park after averaging multiple analyses from a single site.

The dashed lines are the quartiles. The solid horizontal lines are respectively the 5th and 95th percentiles and the median. The short, broad diamond represents the mean and the black dots are individual data.

Extended Data Figure 2 Box plot with distribution shape for CO2/He in gas from 107 locations in Yellowstone National Park after averaging multiple analyses from a single site.

The dashed lines are the quartiles. The solid horizontal lines are respectively the 5th and 95th percentiles and the median. The short, broad diamond represents the mean and the black dots are individual data.

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This file contains the Source Data for Table 1 in the main paper. (XLSX 52 kb)

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Lowenstern, J., Evans, W., Bergfeld, D. et al. Prodigious degassing of a billion years of accumulated radiogenic helium at Yellowstone. Nature 506, 355–358 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12992

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