Yellowstone: nowhere to hide

Dr. Michael Rampino, a Vulcanologist from NYU, was interviewed by Fox News on January 7th. I can't embed the video because they turned that off but you can click the link and watch it at their site. Here are a few of the statements. The clip is interesting, lengthy for a tv news spot, and has a lot of graphics shown while the Doctor is talking:

Interviewer: "What do you see in all these small earthquakes that have occurred since the day after Christmas?"

Doctor: "It made us all sit up and take notice that something is going on at Yellowstone. It is a restless volcano, most people don't know that when they go to the park they are inside the cauldron of a supervolcano that has erupted many times in the past..."

Interviewer: "Is this realistic, or are we just scaring people out there? I mean, people are writing in, thinking this is Armageddon..."

Doctor: "The probability that this will occur at any particular year is very small but we know it has happened in the past and we know that Yellowstone tends goes off on these large supervolcanic eruptions..."

Doctor: "We may be seeing the magma chamber doing things in preparation for a large eruption, or we may be seeing presagings of a small eruption, or we may just be seeing restless magma chamber moving around and things will go back to normal and we won't see an eruption for thousands of years."

Interviewer: "Old Faithful: not so faithful any more...is that a suggestion of what's happening below the earth's surface?"

Doctor: "We look for any changes. We see the ground bulging up, we see geysers going off at different times, we see earthquakes below the volcano...all these may indicate a lessening of stress on the volcano, or it may indicate the stress inside the volcano is getting greater. We really don't know enough about the precursors of a large volcanic eruption to make any kind of a reasonable prediction about what might happen at Yellowstone."

graphical interlude: 1,000-3,000 eqs per year at Yellowstone, in one week there have been 500+

Interviewer: "Doctor is this the kind of thing that keeps you up at night?"

Doctor: "It doesn't keep me up at night but it certainly keeps me thinking about what sort of major disaster may be hitting us from left field. We are not prepared for the global environmental effects that could affect the climate, for example..."

The upshot is that there would be nowhere to hide. Except in Jesus' saving grace and knowledge that life in Him is eternal. The Yellowstone incident has shaken the world, and caused more than a few to understand that self-sufficiency is illusory. God is in control, and with Jesus as savior there is nothing to fear. Ever.

Yellowstone situation update: quakes are stronger today!

Situation [culled from various sources]

At 11:32 this morning a 3.5 magnitude earthquake was reported 38 miles east southeast of West Yellowstone, Mont., in Yellowstone National Park — the latest in a swarm of earthquakes that has hit the area in the past week. The 3.5 tremor was followed this afternoon by a 3.2 magnitude quake at 12:40 and a 3.0 at 1:15. The swarm of tremors is the largest series of back-to-back quakes to hit the area in years, according to scientists. Today's quakes came on the heels of a series of tremors on New Year's Day, including a 3.0 at 6:30 p.m. and a 3.1 at 6:21 p.m. "The December 2008 earthquake sequence is the most intense in this area for some years," said the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

The observatory said the National Park Service in Yellowstone is being fully informed of the ongoing seismic activity by the University of Utah and the U.S. Geological Survey. The Wyoming Office of Homeland Security is reviewing Earthquake Response Plans and also monitoring the seismic activity that has been felt by Park Service employees and guests at the park.

Over the past two days, more than 37 temors have shaken the earth below Yellowstone Lake, causing scientists to speculate on the cause and field questions on whether the quakes were a prelude to an eruption of the park’s super volcano.

“It’s an energetic earthquake swarm,” said Mike Stickney, director of the earthquake studies office for the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology. “I’m hearing reports that people in the park have been feeling some of them.”

Stickney said mild earthquakes swarms are relatively common for the Yellowstone region. This round of quakes, however, may be more vigorous than in recent years, though the cause is just as puzzling.

“There have been two other swarms this fall that come to mind,” said Stickney. “But they weren’t as many and they weren’t as large as what we’re seeing now.”

webicorder data:
http://www.seis.utah.edu/helicorder/heli/yellowstone/index.html
http://www.henrysforkcountry.com/atf.php?sid=198

Yellowstone: eq swarm continues. A precursor?

This reporter at US News & World Report has posted five articles exploring the quicksand data under the boiling cauldron that is the equation of eq swarm/eruption. Bad puns to be sure, but the data is both solid and quicksand because though USGS and Utah Univ collect a lot of data, they have no context for understanding if all this activity is a precursor or not. And there the issue boils, as many thousands of people across the globe attempt to understand what has happening this past week at Yellowstone and what it may mean for the future of mankind.

As an indicator of worldwide interest, my blog normally gets 100 hits a day. When I posted about Obama being our "First Non-Christian President" on Nov 22, I got 1000 hits. But these past two days the hits have blown the charts away.

With these successive posts by the US News reporter, it seems that there is a dividing line between the public go-to guy, Dr. Jacob Lowenstern, and other scientists. That divergence becomes obvious with this latest update from the US NEws reporter. In other words, it seems like the reporter just ain't buying the "nothing to see here" routine from Dr. Lowenstern any more:

Yellowstone Earthquakes: Supervolcano Update

January 02, 2009 03:31 PM ET
BY James Pethokoukis

A Yellowstone earthquake update:

1) The rumbling continues, including 3.5, 3.0 and 3.2 quakes just today2) Here is some more Jake Lowenstern (the Yellowstone volcano scientist) analysis (via TIME):

Jake Lowenstern, Ph.D.,YVO's chief scientist, who also is part of the USGS Volcano Hazards Team, told TIME that it doesn't appear a supervolcano event is imminent. "We don't think the amount of magma exists that would create one of these large eruptions of the past," he said. "It is still possible to have a volcanic eruption comparable to other volcanoes. But we would expect to see more and larger quakes, deformation and precursory explosions out of the lake. We don't believe that anything strange is happening right now." Last summer, YVO installed new instrumentation in boreholes 500 to 600 feet deep to better detect ground deformation. Says Lowenstern: "We have a lot more ability to look at all the data now.

3) Here is a passage on the Yellowstone supervolcano from "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. He interviews a Yellowstone geologist, Paul Doss. I don't find it reassuring:

I asked him what caused Yellowstone to blow when it did.

"Don't know. Nobody knows. Volcanoes are strange things. We really don't understand them at all. Vesuvius, in Italy, was active for three hundred years until an eruption in 1944 and then it just stopped. It's been silent ever since. Some volcanologists think that it is recharging in a big way, which is a little worrying because two million people live on or around it. But nobody knows."

"And how much warning would you get if Yellowstone was going to go?"
He shrugged. "Nobody was around the last time it blew, so nobody knows what the warning signs are. Probably you would have swarms of earthquakes and some surface uplift and possibly some changes in the patterns of behavior of the geysers and steam vents, but nobody really knows."

"So it could just blow without warning?"

He nodded thoughtfully. The trouble, he explained, is that nearly all the things that would constitute warning signs already exist in some measure at Yellowstone. "Earthquakes are generally a precursor of volcanic eruptions, but the park already has lots of earthquakes-1,260 of them last year. Most of them are too small to be felt, but they are earthquakes nonetheless."

A change in the pattern of geyser eruptions might also be taken as a clue, he said, but these too vary unpredictably. Once the most famous geyser in the park was Excelsior Geyser. It used to erupt regularly and spectacularly to heights of three hundred feet, but in 1888 it just stopped. Then in 1985 it erupted again, though only to a height of eighty feet. Steamboat Geyser is the biggest geyser in the world when it blows, shooting water four hundred feet into the air, but the intervals between its eruptions have ranged from as little as four days to almost fifty years. "If it blew today and again next week, that wouldn't tell us anything at all about what it might do the following week or the week after or twenty years from now," Doss says. "The whole park is so volatile that it's essentially impossible to draw conclusions from almost anything that happens."

Evacuating Yellowstone would never be easy. The park gets some three million visitors a year, mostly in the three peak months of summer. The park's roads are comparatively few and they are kept intentionally narrow, partly to slow traffic, partly to preserve an air of picturesqueness, and partly because of topographical constraints. At the height of summer, it can easily take half a day to cross the park and hours to get anywhere within it. "Whenever people see animals, they just stop, wherever they are," Doss says. "We get bear jams. We get bison jams. We get wolf jams."

In the autumn of 2000, representatives from the U.S. Geological Survey and National Park Service, along with some academics, met and formed something called the Yellowstone Volcanic Observatory. Four such bodies were in existence already-in Hawaii, California, Alaska, and Washington-but oddly none in the largest volcanic zone in the world. The YVO is not actually a thing, but more an idea-an agreement to coordinate efforts at studying and analyzing the park's diverse geology. One of their first tasks, Doss told me, was to draw up an "earthquake and volcano hazards plan"-a plan of action in the event of a crisis.

"There isn't one already?" I said.
"No. Afraid not. But there will be soon."
"Isn't that just a little tardy?"
He smiled. "Well, let's just say that it's not any too soon."

Looks Like Harmonic Tremors at Yellowstone Super Volcano

The unusual and concerning quake reports out of Yellowstone has everyone looking at seismographs until their eyes bug out. The unusually long and pointed earthquake swarm occurring since Dec. 26th has transformed into harmonic tremors, which the red circle depicts.



"It has been reported and noted by the USGS that an earthquake swarm has been occurring under Lake Yellowstone since December 26th. The attached webcorder display shows that after the tremor swarm activity died down this evening a new pattern of potential classic harmonic tremors has started and continues at the time of this posting. Harmonic tremors could mean lava is now moving under the Yellowstone super volcano."

"The USGS has made no updates since these tremors began."
Yellowstone webcorders can be accessed @ http://www.seis.utah.edu/helicorder/heli/yellowstone/index.html

"There have been more earthquakes than usual centered under the ancient Yellowstone Supervolcano's Caldera and the small quakes are enough that that has scientists concerned about a huge eruption from Yellowstone. Researchers are stumped as to why the earthquakes are stronger than usual."

"A report from Gene Byrd notes, "The park has thousands of earthquakes each year but these have researchers concerned and the report notes that they have long predicted that the Yellowstone supervolcano will eventually erupt again."

There is always a lot of seismic activity in and around the Yellowstone caldera. What is different this time are the length of the swarm, the absence of the tremors relating to a known fault, the fact that it is under the lakebed, the rising ground where the alleged magma bulge is, and they are extremely shallow. The BBC produced a series called "End Day", showing in movie form a la Ground Hog day, the same man awakening to the last day on earth, each time the earth ends differently. The six most likely scenarios are the backdrop, and one of these likeliest are the Yellowstone Supervolcano eruption. The clip intersperses scientific information in between the storylines. It's 9 min. I don't think Yellowstone Supervolcano is going to erupt yet, but what do I know. It has caught the interest and attention of scientists worldwide, though.