There is a scientific renaissance being driven by the geological, biological, and medical research being completed at Mammoth Hot Springs that is reframing our basic approach to tackling the grand challenges that face society regarding environmental change, energy sustainability, human health, and space exploration.

This summer, Dr. Bruce Fouke will lead Yellowstone Forever Institute program participants around Mammoth Hot Spring’s otherworldly features and discuss the incredible insights and applications it has on this planet and beyond.

We briefly caught up with Bruce as he described his history of research in Yellowstone and what he hopes participants will come away with from his Field Seminar.

When did you first come to Yellowstone?

My parents brought me and my sisters to Yellowstone many times while growing up in rural Iowa and I continued to visit throughout college and graduate school. My first research and teaching trips to Yellowstone were in April 1995.

How long have you been teaching and doing research in Mammoth Hot Springs and throughout the park? What excites you about this work to keep coming back year after year?

For 30 years I have taught and completed research in Yellowstone. In the process I have brought 1,000’s of students and scientific colleagues into the Park from across the United States and around the world. Mammoth serves as a unique natural laboratory in which to study the complexity, interrelatedness, relevance and power of all natural forces. Mammoth’s impact ranges from environmental conservation and sustainable energy, to space exploration and human medicine.

How did your book with photographer Tom Murphy, The Art of Yellowstone Science, come to be?

In November 2008, the National Park Service was designing new scientific displays at the Old Faithful Visitor Center and they asked Tom to join me in the field to photograph our research. I believe my first words to Tom were “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”. Tom is a constant source of inspiration to me. I am so deeply thankful and honored that Yellowstone brought our global paths of life together.

What do you hope participants come away with from your Field Seminar this summer?

I want participants to walk away from this Field Seminar with an entirely new perspective, inspired new understanding and expansive new vision of Mammoth Hot Springs and the role it now plays in cutting-edge global science. The survival of Life on Earth through geological time has depended on organisms successfully responding to, and eventually controlling, mineral growth within the environment. These Life-Water-Mineral interactions have long been an essential, unavoidable, and ubiquitously distributed force of nature, providing fundamental benefits for health and survival (from bones to teeth) as well as profound practical problems and disease (from kidney stones to heart calcification). Integration of concepts and techniques from Geology, Biology and Medicine called GeoBioMed), is our approach forged at Mammoth, which has opened a whole new realm of unexplored hypotheses for testing novel drug therapies and clinical interventions as viable alternatives to reliance on surgery.

Mammoth Hot Springs: Insights into Medicine & Space Exploration

Dates: June 19 – 22, 2025
Instructor: Bruce Fouke, Ph.D.
Location: Based out Gardiner, MT