Hundreds of Mostly Tiny Quakes Are Rattling Yellowstone Park

In the last two weeks, more than 100 mostly tiny earthquakes a day, on average, have rattled a remote area of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, putting scientists who monitor the park’s strange and volatile geology on alert.

Researchers say that for now, the earthquake cluster, or swarm — the second-largest ever recorded in the park — is more a cause for curiosity than alarm. The quake zone, about 10 miles northwest of the Old Faithful geyser, has shown little indication, they said, of building toward a larger event, like a volcanic eruption of the type that last ravaged the Yellowstone region tens of thousands of years ago.

The area is far from any road or community, and the park is relatively empty in winter. Swarms of small quakes, including a significant swarm last year, are relatively common.

But at a time when the disastrous earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12 has refocused global attention on the earth’s immense store of tectonic energy, scientists say that the Yellowstone swarm, if only because of its volume, bears close observation: as of Sunday, there had been 1,608 quakes since Jan. 17.

“We’re not seeing a pattern that is really discernible yet,” said Henry Heasler, a coordinating scientist for the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, a joint venture of Yellowstone, the United States Geological Survey and the University of Utah. Dr. Heasler said plans were in place to intensify observations in case the swarm continued for a long time or got larger. “We’re ready to ramp up,” he said, including using flights to monitor the area.

Researchers at the University of Utah’s Seismograph Stations who have tracked Yellowstone swarms said they thought it was coincidental that another big swarm of more 1,000 quakes had struck the park just over a year ago. At the time, it was the second-biggest cluster recorded there. The largest swarm was in 1985, when 3,000 earthquakes struck over three months.

Source/Full Story: NYTimes.com

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