The Yellowstone SuperCaldera Project

There have now been 7 earthquakes in Yellowstone in the past week, with the largest being the a 3.1 yesterday.



MAG DATE UTC-TIME LAT LON DEPTH LOCATION
y/m/d h:m:s deg deg km

3.1 2004/01/17 07:29:47 44.286 -110.677 5.0 54 km ( 34 mi) SE of West Yellowstone, MT
1.6 2004/01/15 12:07:43 44.146 -110.341 7.9 68 km ( 42 mi) NE of Alta, WY
1.7 2004/01/15 06:49:45 44.135 -110.322 8.0 69 km ( 43 mi) NE of Alta, WY
1.8 2004/01/15 02:21:35 44.089 -110.550 5.1 51 km ( 32 mi) NE of Alta, WY
1.1 2004/01/13 06:23:59 44.226 -110.403 5.8 71 km ( 44 mi) NE of Alta, WY
1.4 2004/01/13 01:36:24 44.242 -110.777 2.0 45 km ( 28 mi) ENE of Warm River, ID
1.3 2004/01/11 16:41:43 44.143 -110.335 8.6 68 km ( 42 mi) NE of Alta, WY

Well, I realize its been a while since my last post tracking GPS observations. There is a very good reason and thats no update to the time/velocity plots have been made since early summer 2003. I have finally gotten tired of seeing the little green dots flash "no rinex data available" and decided to break the stations down and see if I could find some data outside Utah's little program. I did find one point which has been figured into their conversions that they do not own. Its the NGS site in Billings and they are keeping the data online and up to date. So, even if it isn't the nice velocity vectors we had hoped for, its still a reminder and confirmation of ground motion in the area.

Here's the link.


www.ngs.noaa.gov...

When opening this site, use the left pull down box and select either bil1 or bil2 and the time series plots. For now and for some unknown reason, this seems to be the only live data pertaining to land movement.

While on that same site, I found this little station as well right in the heat of things. What luck!

www.ngs.noaa.gov...


I don't know why it was mentioned in Utah's study but its still collecting data.

There was a 3.0 in Teton Village yesterday.

3.0 2004/01/22 03:17:39 43.616 -110.635 5.0 16 km ( 10 mi) ENE of Teton Village, WY

Things are not "normal" in the park either. There are several webicorders showing magmatic-flow-type indications, but in particular check out Mary Lake.

www.seis.utah.edu...

PLEASE GET YOUR QUESTIONS SUBMITTED TO ME **PRIOR** TO FRIDAY AS I AM INTENDING TO FOLLOW UP **ON** FRIDAY THE 6TH.

My email is [email protected], or you can u2u.

Thank you!

There have been 31 earthquakes in the past week in Yellowstone.

www.seis.utah.edu...

DEADLINE IS TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT!

SUBMIT! SUBMIT! SUBMIT!!!!!

There has just been a long period event that is registering on Mary Lake, Norris Junction and Mammoth Hot Springs (possibly others) in Yellowstone.

Would like to place a link to the USGS Interview here:

ATSNN Interview with USGS Scientists

Seismic levels have been at background levels for the past month.

There was an interesting anomaly yesterday as ALL the park�s webricorders went offline for about a half an hour. Two hours prior to the outage, the Yellowstone Lake webricorder displayed strong motion that was sustained for an hour. There were no earthquakes in the region at the time. The Old Faithful webricorder was also displaying movement before and after the outage. The two events may not be related but seem coincidently timed when you consider the Lake webricorder has been quiet for the past couple of months.

www.seis.utah.edu...

I know it isn't much notice but I just found out. The Discovery channel is running a story on Supervolcanos starring Yellowstone at 10 pm EDT tonight, April 11th 2004. Hope any interested parties that read this in time can catch it.

Just a heads up team. According to Advisor we are in dire threat of being re-staffed.



And that sounds painful! lol

See Advisor's post here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...



[Edited on 4-12-2004 by Valhall]

Interesting, interesting.

The Billings Gazette, which is a good source of info on current Yellowstone talk, had this to say:

Here's a reason to breathe easier: Civilization probably won't be crippled anytime soon by a pulverizing volcanic eruption at Yellowstone National Park.
New research indicates there is probably not a huge pot of magma brewing beneath Yellowstone that's building up to a superviolent eruption thousands of times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
"If something like that was cooking up right now we'd see the evidence, and we don't," said Drew Coleman, an assistant geology professor at the University of North Carolina.
Billings Gazette

In conjunction with Valhall's ATSNN interview, one wonders....
is there really nothing to worry about?
If there is, how do we discount these scientists' claims?

Banshee, isn't that like the first scientist to come out and say something like that when most others have been discussing a buildup? I might be confused as I haven't read the posts recently. This very thread on yellowstone is how I found ATS in Nov/Dec I think.

Well, I don't think we discount them but I'm not ready to hitch my horse to them either. I think its all a matter of opinion and I think we're seeing numerous opinions as would be expected on a subject which is so hard to grasp. With so many outlying paramenters, its no telling how they came to this conclusion exactly. Yeah, they provide a reference and so do those who think the chamber is filling ie.. the shifting lake and swelling ground.

I think its important to include all objective reasoning in such an investigation as the validity of the outcome is sovemewhat absolute in the face of the speculation anyway. While we, as core researchers with nothing to gain either way can listen and learn, we cannot fully decipher the code enough to know who have intentions of accuracy and who have political agendas so we must take into account everything with the proverbial grain of salt.

While the scientist who granted the interview to Val was all well and good and a milestone for ATS, many questions went unanswered or were dismissed as invalid with no legitimate reason such as the contigency plan FEMA has in the area and the radius for damage. If the past tufts were any indication, it would be catastrophic.

I understand your response. What I find interesting is that a state like Wyoming receives so much in homeland defense funding. Reference the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Homeland Security's official website and a recent article:

hsc.house.gov...

To paraphrase:
"One obvious distortion is that California receives less than $5 per person in first responder grants, while Wyoming receives more than $35. The same result obtains in other large states, including New York. Equally unjustifiable, however, is that with rare exception the rest of the funds are allocated only according to population. While larger population concentrations may indeed be terror targets, this is a very unsophisticated approach to what should be an intelligence-driven process. Small-population farm states such as Iowa can legitimately claim attention because of their responsibilities for the nation's food supply. Regions such as Alaska and Wyoming that have few people are thick with defense assets, energy and other productive infrastructure. "

Outside of Cheyenne Mountain, what other major installations are in Wyoming? I ask because wonder if there is a correlation between the caldera, its possible role as an unintentional/intentional WMD and the level of funds for homeland security. I realize this may be off-topic here but I've truly enjoyed reading this research thread so I wanted to solicit your opinions.

[Edited on 4-5-2004 by titian]

[Edited on 4-5-2004 by titian]

A seismological report is long overdue here. Yellowstone seismicity remains at background levels and seems unaffected by all the activity on the west coast.