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Swarm Of Earthquakes At Yellowstone National Park Catches Attention

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Published Date

June 26, 2017

A recent swarm of earthquakes in Yellowstone caught media attention, but was considered normal for the park/University of Utah Seismograph Stations

A recent swarm of small earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park raised some media attention but was considered normal for Yellowstone, according to geologists.

Between June 12 and June 17, there were more than 450 earthquakes in the park, with the largest measuring a magnitude of 4.5 and located inside the park eight miles north-northeast of West Yellowstone, according to the University of Utah Seismology Station. Small quakes continued in and outside the park's western border after June 17. 

"Earthquake swarms are common in Yellowstone and, on average, comprise about 50 percent of the total seismicity in the Yellowstone region," the station noted. "This is the highest number of earthquakes at Yellowstone within a single week in the past five years, but is fewer than weekly counts during similar earthquakes swarms in 2002, 2004, 2008 and 2010."

The swarm in 2010 came in January of that year, and totaled more than 1,270 recorded quakes. That swarm was attributed to the grinding of tectonic plates, not pressure from the magma chamber below Yellowstone.

Back during the winter of 2008-2009, a series of more than 900 quakes was measured between December 26 and January 8.

Yellowstone is set atop a simmering volcano. Complementing -- or perhaps complicating -- that is the fact that the park is near the boundaries of some of the "tectonic regimes" associated with the North American tectonic plate.

Those regimes include the Yellowstone "hotspot," a plume of magma burning like a candle beneath the North American plate, and the Basin and Range Province just to the west, a landscape that has been defined ever-so-slowly (in human time) by the stretching of the Earth's crust and upper mantle. With the exertions of these various forces, it should be no surprise that Yellowstone is one of the more geologically active spots in North America.

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