When you woke up this morning and were wondering what would happen on that first day of winter in 2025, a huge mud explosion probably wasn’t on your mental list. However, this is what happened, at Yellowstone Park’s famous Black Diamond Pool – a large, wet mud explosion. The hot mud was also a volcanic event.
A terrifying mud eruption in Yellowstone’s Black Diamond Basin was captured on webcam pic.twitter.com/neSIX6R1NC
– New York Post (@nypost) December 21, 2025
The Associated Press piece has more Details about the bad event.
“Kiss me!”
That’s the word US Geological Survey experts used to describe the muddy eruption at Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone National Park on Saturday morning.
Video shared by the USGS on social media shows mud spraying up and out of the pool just before 9:23 a.m. Biscuit tub About halfway between park favorites Old Faithful and Grand Prismatic.
Other recent explosions were mostly audible and invisible, because they occurred either at night or when snow was blocking the camera.
The agency said Black Diamond Pool was previously the site of Hydrothermal explosionin July 2024, sending rocks and mud flying hundreds of feet high and damaging the walkway. This has resulted in the area being closed to visitors due to damage and the potential for additional hazardous activity.
So-called dirty explosions up to 40 feet (about 12 meters) high have occurred intermittently since then.
No one was injured in this event, which is a good thing. But with this location, there is no guarantee that something much worse will happen, sometime in the next few thousand years.
Here are the onions:
Park officials say Yellowstone preserves the most extraordinary collection of hot springs, geysers, clay pots and fumaroles on Earth. More than 10,000 hydrothermal features are found within the park, more than 500 of which are hot springs.
There’s a good reason for this little piece of national park trivia.
Read more: What’s going on with the ring of fire? Now it is a volcano in Russia.
Signs of awakening: Italian supervolcano could send the world into chaos
Specifically, there is a lot of hydrothermal and volcanic activity in Yellowstone because the entire Yellowstone Basin sits atop a massive volcano. This basin is a giant volcanic caldera, floating above an enormous reservoir of magma. There were three major eruptions that formed the caldera that we know of: about 2.1 million years ago, about 1.3 million years ago, and the last about 640,000 years ago. There have been smaller eruptions and lava flows since then, but these… Three of them were really crowd pleasers.
The first spewed what is now called the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, which covered about 1.3 million square miles with volcanic ash, from the Pacific Ocean to Iowa and Texas. This eruption was 6,000 times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption.
The second gave us Mesa Falls, which covered more than a thousand square miles in ash, a pike compared to the Huckleberry Ridge event, but still 700 times larger than Mount St. Helens.
Finally, the last major event produced Lava Creek Tuff, which covered 1.5 million square miles in ash and was 2,500 times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption.
Just for fun, here’s a map of those events.
– Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) December 21, 2025
Yellowstone – the park, not the TV show, although the show is very good – is one of North America’s premier attractions. It is a land of unparalleled beauty. It is also a land beneath which hides a ticking time bomb, a time bomb that, if it actually grows any bigger, could end human civilization in North America. Fortunately for us, this phenomenon may not explode like this again for thousands of years, if ever.
So, there’s no reason to cancel your New Year’s Eve plans.
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