YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyoming – Yellowstone National Park is known for its remarkable natural features, from incredible hikes to one-of-a-kind thermal activity. It’s not known for its oil, but, believe it or not, small oil deposits do appear in some of the park’s thermal features. This is just a little amount, so oil drilling in the area seems like it would be fairly pointless, but it’s there, and visitors can sometimes spot this oil seeping out of these features. Scientist-in-Charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory with the USGS explains how that could be.
The oil formed inside tens of millions of years old ancient sediment. When the land was in a shallow, inland sea, that oil was deposited inside Yellowstone. It’s now visible in some thermal areas, thanks to the magmatic system heating it up and pushing it towards the surface.
Though oil drilling is likely not much of a threat to Yellowstone National Park, the Yellowstone River has seen a few spills far from the park throughout the years. In 2015, the Polar Pipeline discharged at least 30,000 gallons of crude oil into the river upstream of Glendive, Montana. Though the spill did no known measurable harm to anything inside or near the national park (Glendive is several hundred miles away from Yellowstone), it did contaminate surface water as far as 30 miles downstream of the release location, and harm both birds and fish in the area.