Entries Tagged as 'Geology'

Is A Geyser Forming Under The Lake?

I’ve monitoring the Whats going on at yellowstone? thread at Abovetopsecret.com.  They noticed an unusual occcurance on the webicorders that lasts about four minutes and was occuring every hour or hour and a half and now is occuring about every 32 minutes.  Take a look at LKWY and notice the dark squiggly line at 1:35, 2:33, 3:32, 4:41, etc. The last one occurred at 11:40. All times are MST.


The chart courtesy of Shirakawa at Abovetopsecret.com (Click to enlarge) shows the duration increasing and the interval between events decreasing.

They are speculating that there may be a geyser forming underwater in Yellowstone lake. Nick_Crawley writes:

We noticed that events were getting bigger and stronger and predicted that IF THE MAGMA WERE RISING OR HEATING UP UNDER THE LAKE that the period it would take for the vent to erupt would get shorter and the interval of the eruptions would trend larger. Look at 1/6. That’s precisely what’s happening, as predicted. The intervals are trending shorter. The eruptions are trending longer.

Other than this recurring squiggle, there is no significant seismic activity.

Remember Chaiten?

The Volcanism Blog says the

Chaitén volcano in southern Chile is still erupting, eight months after bursting into life on 2 May 2008.

For pictures of the eruption in May: http://www.nuestroclima.com/blog/?p=1003

We do not want to experience that here in the U.S.!

Four Major Types Of Seismographs

It appears we experienced one of the top three types in Yellowstone as a result of the Indonesian earthquakes at 7.5+, but probably not harmonic tremors signaling magma movement, although it sure looked like it at the time. Thanks to all of you that corrected UTC time for MST. It is not time to move to Europe from Kansas. I hope for all of us it never is!

Harmonic Tremors at Yellowstone!


Click to enlarge

That last line definitely looks harmonic! That’s at YFT, the Old Faithful station.

UPDATE: This may be a ringing or reaction of the earth to the 7.6 that struck Indonesia.

A Rising Sour Creek Dome

Morpheus is showing a rising Sour Creek Dome:

If you take a look at the unfiltered plot of the continued uplift of the Sour Creek Dome here… (third graph down) you can see for the very last section a new line emerging. The most recent “cloud” of data points are marked in red. See the highest one? If you look to it’s left you can see a trail of points going back into the main data set.


Click to enlarge

Visualizing The Yellowstone Quakes

Here’s an amazing piece of work showing all the earthquakes and their intensities at Yellowstone. It’s done by Arnoud Buzing at the Wolfram Blog Scroll down toward the bottom of his post for the movie.

Is Yellowstone Unique, This Time?

Admittedly, this recent swarm of quakes has attracted a lot of interest, but it may be nothing new, just the regular activity of the caldera typified by this chart and article, Yellowstone Earthquake Swarms.


Click to enlarge

Figure 1. A plot of recorded earthquake activity (≥ M 1.5) at Yellowstone from 1974 through 2004 (blue bars) along with caldera uplift and subsidence (red dotted line). The green line shows the cumulative number of earthquakes for the thirty-year period (Updated from a figure in Waite and Smith, 2002).

Lots of Tremors At Yellowstone

Wow, we just had two quakes at 3.4 to 3.6 followed by a 2.5 than the webicorders went nuts!
See YML

Tremors Moving Across Yellowstone Caldera

If you will, take a look again at the video made by “Shirakawa; a member of AboveTopSecret.com”, at the thread, Whats going on at yellowstone?. You will notice that the earthquakes in Yellowstone are moving north and west over time.

Click to enlarge

In the above map showing the webicorder stations you can see this movement starting with YTP which shows lots of activity. Then move to LKWY which shows extreme tremors from 00;00 to 04:00 on 1/2, then YML which shows BIG tremors from 00:00 to 11:00 on 1/2, then YMR starting at 08:00, now we see increasing activity at YDC and YMC.

What we see is real movement across the caldera from YTP toward the west entrance. I don’t know what it means. However we just has an event at 10:19 registered on YDC and YMC

UPDATE: Amaxium at AboveTopSecret.com has this map illustrating what I am seeing:


Click to enlarge

Earthquake Swarm at Yellowstone Supervolcano: Update

Finally, someone has an interview with USGS. James Pethokoukis of Capital Commerce at U.S. News interviewed Dr. Jacob Lowenstern of the U.S. Geological Survey, top scientist at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory: