When Montana State University volcanologist Madison Myers considered her application for the National Science Foundation’s CAREER grant, she didn’t want to deviate from her research into the Yellowstone volcanic system and the unsolved mysteries of the most recent supereruption.

“I like the idea of a grant supporting what you’re actually doing,” said Myers, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences in the College of Letters and Science at MSU. “If this is something important to me, I’m just going to do it and hope the funding works out eventually.”

It did. This month, the National Science Foundation awarded Myers a five-year, $638,000 CAREER grant, considered one of the most prestigious early career grants for researchers.

"Dr. Myers is a remarkable scientist and so worthy of this prestigious award," said Michael Babcock, head of the Earth Sciences department. "The project will not only advance our understanding of the Yellowstone volcanic system but also emphasizes her strong commitment to student inclusivity and accessibility. Providing opportunities for students to engage in field research and work with an outstanding scientist like Dr. Myers embodies the values of our land-grant mission.”

The grant will fund research into the magma storage and eruption that created the Lava Creek Tuff formation and the Yellowstone Caldera, research which, she notes, will open field opportunities to dozens of students each year.

“All of these people get to have these cool field experiences,” Myers said. “Hopefully that engages them and helps them figure out whether they want to continue in geology or Earth sciences in general.”

Incorporating real-life training for students into the grant was important for Myers, especially with eyes toward inclusivity and accessibility. Over the five-year lifetime of the grant, she will integrate Native American perspectives into a volcanology course she teaches on campus and lead a volunteer program with shorter learning experiences in Yellowstone for those who may not be willing or able to sign on for a full semester.

“There are different ways to be a geologist,” Myers said.

As evidenced by its geysers and other formations, Yellowstone is a stable but active volcanic system. To study the history of that system, researchers like Myers look at formations of tuff, a type of rock created when expelled ash from volcanic activity is heated or compressed.

Most of the research into the Yellowstone volcano is based on tuff from the Huckleberry Ridge eruption, the oldest of just two supereruptions in the area’s history. For an eruption to be a supereruption, as defined by the volcanic explosivity index, the volcano must emit more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material.

According to the National Park Service, the Huckleberry Ridge eruption 2.1 million years ago “coated 5,790 square miles with ash, as far away as Missouri. The total volcanic material ejected is estimated to have been 6,000 times the volume of material ejected during the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.”

Unlike Mt. St. Helens, which exploded from a single large magma chamber, the Huckleberry Ridge tuff seems to have originated from small pockets under the Earth’s crust, each with a different depth and its own chemistry.

“Huckleberry was interesting because there was evidence of a slow start with weeks to months of pulses of material coming out from separate chambers rather than big ones,” said Myers, who studied the eruption as part of her doctoral research at the University of Oregon. “The whole eruption was kind of like this. There were these time breaks where it paused and you have these discrete magma sources. It seems like it came out chaotically.”

Studies of the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff in Yellowstone provided one of the first examples of this type of magma storage in a volcanic system. Now Myers wants to know if the most recent supereruption 640,000 years ago, the Lava Creek, occurred in a similar fashion and if the separate, smaller chambers of magma may contribute to the stability of the active volcanic system.

“Is this just the way Yellowstone does it?” asked Myers, who facilitated MSU’s membership to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory in 2020. “And how might that inform the way magma accumulates today? Are there still these pods that are very isolated from each other underneath?”

Much of what is known of the Lava Creek tuff is based on mapping done by the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1960s and 1970s. The maps outline where remnants of the eruption ended up and where they likely came from. Further study is centered on a handful of outcrops around the edge of the caldera where lobes of hot gassy ash solidified.

“The tuff is a massive thing that covers most of the park and part of Idaho,” Myers said. “Those four or five outcrops are telling you a small piece of a large puzzle. It could take a lifetime to learn the whole puzzle.”

At the beginning of June, Myers and her team headed to an outcrop that is supposed to be part of the most recent supereruption of the Yellowstone volcanic system, but that classification didn’t sit well with Myers.

“It had a different kind of texture. It had different materials in it,” she said. “There’s either more variation in this than we understand, or this actually part of the oldest eruption which is mis-mapped.”

Her team will use argon dating to test the minerals in the outcrop to determine if the area is instead part of the first supereruption. Myers and her team will couple field observations and chemical analysis of each exposed area of the Lava Creek Tuff to establish likely boundaries and a timeline for the eruption.

“I’m hoping in five years we know a good deal, but we’re not going to know everything. There’s no way,” Myers said. “But can we lay a foundation to then ask another set of questions that allows us to learn even more?”

According to Myers, a deeper understanding of the system, how it works and how it is triggered will ultimately help recognize signs of unrest in Yellowstone and similar volcanoes.