Another Swarm of Earthquakes Noticed at Yellowstone National Park

Published Date

January 19, 2010

It was just more than a year ago when a series of earthquakes shook and rattled Yellowstone National Park for enough days to raise volcanologists' eyebrows. Well, there's another swarm of quakes shaking the park, but so far the scientists say there's nothing unusual going on.

According to the University of Utah researchers, seismograph stations have been tracking an ongoing earthquake swarm in Yellowstone that began Sunday afternoon. The swarm is located about 10 miles northwest of Old Faithful and 9 miles southeast of West Yellowstone, Montana. The largest earthquake in the swarm as of 3 p.m. MST Tuesday was a magnitude 3.7 event that occurred roughly a half-hour earlier in the day.

There have been 469 located earthquakes in the swarm of magnitudes 0.5 to 3.7. This includes five events of magnitude larger than 3, with 34 events of magnitude 2 to 3, and 430 events of magnitude less than 2, park officials said in a release. There have been multiple personal reports of ground shaking from observations inside Yellowstone and in neighboring communities in Montana and Idaho for some of the larger events. Earthquake swarms of this nature are relatively common in Yellowstone, the release said.

At this time the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory does not consider the swarm to be unusual and the earthquakes are likely related to tectonic fault sources. Also there is no indication of premonitory volcanic or hydrothermal activity, but ongoing analyses will evaluate these different sources. Information on the earthquake can be viewed at the University of Utah
Seismograph Stations: http://www.seis.utah.edu/.

Seismograph recordings from stations of the Yellowstone seismograph station can be viewed online at: http://quake.utah.edu/helicorder/yell_webi.htm.

Anyone who has felt earthquakes in the swarm are encouraged to fill out a form on the USGS Community Felt reports web site: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/.

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Submitted by admin on January 19, 2010 - 10:26pm.

2012: More than Just a Doomsday Movie:
- FOXNews (26.12.2009): Yellowstone to Become Best Monitored Hot Spots in World - The Yellowstone "supervolcano" will soon be among the best monitored hot spots in the world with the installation of new earthquake monitoring equipment...
- Science Daily (Dec. 14, 2009): Yellowstone's Plumbing Reveals Plume of Hot and Molten Rock 410 Miles Deep...:
http://cristiannegureanu.blogspot.com/2009/12/foxnews-yellowstone-to-bec...

Submitted by jsmacdonald on January 20, 2010 - 11:23pm.

And, wow, gosh, it's been so warm recently ... this all MUST mean that hell is a brewing and it's FURY will be UNLEASHED.

(Then again, snow is in the forecast.)

Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World

Submitted by admin on April 14, 2010 - 9:09pm.

As a geography teacher of Asia and and Africa, I have not focused very much on the United States. That all changed in 2007 when my wife, daughter, and I made our first Western trip. We experienced record heat passing through Arkansas on a bumpy interstate, missed a tornado by minutes in northern Texas, walked on ancient lava in New Mexico, hiked the petrfied forest in Arizona, hiked almost a mile down into the Grand Canyon to Ooh Aah Point, missed a flash flood in the canyons outside Sedona by minutes, crossed the Hoover Dam and waded in Lake Meade, and had the world's fastest picnic while enduring a temperature of 118 degrees. We rode a gondola inside the Venetian in Las Vegas, hiked Zion National Park (a true Eden in the desert), hiked & picnicked Antelope Island in Great Salt Lake, shopped the streets of Jackson Hole, hiked around Lake Jackson in the Grand Teton's, endured a thunderstorm in a cabin at Colter Bay, hiked and explored Yellowstone's Treasures, videoed buffalo all around my car in the Lamar Valley, survived a twisted ankle from my wife at Mommoth Springs, escaped a forest fire on the way out of Yellowstone's east entrance, drove across the state of Wyoming in search of a hotel room, drove by the famed Stanley Hotel at night (too scared to stay there), survived my daughter's altitude sickness in Rocky Mountain National Park and had even more excitement on our 2009 western trip. Needless to say, your site is very enjoyable to me and I look forward to visiting it in the future.

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