Posts Tagged ‘yellowstone’

Yellowstone Wake-Up Call Heard in Denver?

Monday, February 1st, 2010

The current Yellowstone earthquake swarm is now “the second-largest ever recorded in the park,” according to researchers quoted in the NY Times.

Shortly after 1 AM this morning, the 1st of February 2010, I awakened and was lying in bed listening to the quiet of the night.  No traffic disturbed the silence as the city slept in anticipation of Monday morning and the new work week.  Then around 1.15 AM I heard a sudden loud, sharp cracking sound coming from my house, similar to the settling of an old building.  The noise surprised me since my house is extraordinarily quiet other than seasonal creaking associated with a massive elm’s root growth cycle.

My first thought?  Yellowstone.  Yes, Yellowstone.

There will, of course, be naysayers out there who will write off what I’m about to report as a simple coincidence.  But statistically speaking, this event stands out.  After all, I’d never before thought that any noise in my house was possibly related to seismic activity occurring 600 miles away.

Yet somehow, quickly and intuitively, I made a connection between the sound I’d just heard and Yellowstone.  I noted the time on my fairly-accurate bedside clock and determined that first thing in the morning I’d check out the Yellowstone quake log posted by the USGS to see if I could link the unusual cracking sound I heard a little before 1.15 AM with a quake.

Sure enough, this morning I booted up the computer and here’s what I found:  a modest, magnitude 2.6 quake rumbled under Yellowstone at 1.11 this morning, Monday the 1st of February.  More precisely, the USGS site noted the time of the quake as 08:10:42 UT, which is 7 hours ahead of Mountain time, and just moments before I heard the noise – accounting for the time it takes for seismic waves to travel through the Earth’s crust.

So even though I didn’t feel the Earth move, my house may have registered the quake with a bit of shifting and creaking that could easily be dismissed if certain “earthquake risk factors” I’ve written about recently didn’t exist.

For instance, an almost-overlooked mild solar wind stream arrived on the 30th, stirring up Earth’s geomagnetic field and resulting in some nice Norwegian auroras.  And last night when I got up after hearing the sound, the extraordinary glow of 2010’s perigee moon bathed the house in a soft glow that enchanted me on the one hand, and on the other made me wonder if the moon’s gravity might result in increased gravitational pull on Earth’s stressed tectonic plates.  Finally, Yellowstone hadn’t had a magnitude 2 quake in a couple of days.

With all these factors in place, pressure would likely build.

Even though I can’t prove the noise was in any way related to the quake, when it happened there was absolutely no rationalising, no sign of Occam.  There was simply a knowing, and there still is, that Mother Earth is speaking – and if we listen hard enough, we just might get her message.

STACE TUSSEL

Addendum:  A small earthquake (mag 2.5) hit near Oklahoma City the same day I wrote this article.  A line between Yellowstone and the Oklahoma quake zone near Oklahoma City just skirts the northeastern part of the Denver metro area.  Coincidence, or part of a linked fault line?  I’m simply mentioning it as food for thought…

Mid-Continent US Earthquakes Increasing Since Haiti Quake

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

seismogram

seismogram

Seismograph, 2005. Courtesy http://science.uniserve.edu.au

Is Increased Seismic Activity Related to Solar Cycle 24???

The Denver Post reported yesterday that “Yellowstone National Park has been rattled by more than 250 earthquakes in the past two days following a period of 11 months of quiet seismic activity in the park. The quakes have been gaining strength, with a magnitude 3.1 tremor recorded at 11:03 a.m…. Prof. Robert B. Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Utah and one of the leading experts on earthquake and volcanic activity at Yellowstone, said that the activity is a ‘notable swarm.'” Read more.

As I’ve been writing this article today, I’ve noticed that most recently a new Post article has come out that relays information easily obtained on the USGS website, indicating two new, stronger tremors just this afternoon that seem to be creeping toward the 4.0 mark  – see here.

Certainly Yellowstone sees its share of mild earthquakes during these occasional swarms, but as the Denver Post pointed out, this surge of recent and increasing activity follows a relatively-quiet period, so I’m monitoring the USGS earthquake activity site, which shows today that a stronger earthquake hit Yellowstone early this morning, the 19th, registering a 3.4 on the Richter Scale.

I’ve actually been writing this article all day during lulls at work today, and I’ve just learned that a couple hours ago, at about 3 PM Mountain Time (Tuesday the 29th), there were two more temblors at Yellowstone, each bigger than before, both registering a more interesting magnitude 3.6.

If I were scheduled for a Yellowstone vacation, you can bet I’d be postponing it as of today!

We may be the beginning of a somewhat disturbing trend….

In summary: the current Yellowstone swarm intensified yesterday – the same day that northern New Mexico recorded an unusually strong temblor of magnitude 4.1 (or thereabout).   And just three days prior to that, on the 15th, Oklahoma recorded its strongest quake in over 10 years, a magnitude 4.0.

This activity highlights a cluster of increased-magnitude quakes over the central United States, coinciding with the horrific Haiti earthquake on the 12th.

“There is absolutely no connection between what is occurring in Yellowstone and the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti,” reported the Denver Post. “They are completely different systems,” doctoral student Jamie Farrell told the Post. “They are not related.”

Farrell’s assertion that the earthquakes are not related because they “are completely different systems,” indicates that he’s referring to a the absence of a clear tectonic plate link.  I suspect that a different link exists between the devastating Haitian quake and the subsequent increased activity in the west-central United States during the past week, having less to do with a crustal continuity of fault lines and much more with other correlating factors which are ultimately much more difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss.  (See my post just prior to this one.)

Here’s what I’m noticing:  we’ve got quite a cluster of earthquakes going, their outbursts coinciding with active solar windstorms exerting pressure on the Earth’s fragile crust.  We should not underestimate the strength of the Sun’s awakening and its effects on Earth as a geomagnetic system – literally, to our planet’s very core.  People pay attention to the beautiful affects of solar wind; the northern lights, for instance, have been extraordinarily active in the past couple of days – but is their enchanting display lulling us into the arms of a present danger?

A few of you have probably heard that the Norway Spiral that heralded the beginning of Europe and Asia’s unseasonably snowy and cold winter may have been the result of human tampering (oh my) of the HAARP variety, puncturing the thermosphere and allowing an outflow of heat (thus, Europe’s deep freeze) and creating a window for solar wind to slam into the Earth’s crust.

I’m no scientist, but I’m thinking cosmic geomagnetic interactions between the Sun and the Earth could be impacting the molten core of Earth in ways that we could not have predicted – at the apparent dawning of Solar Cycle 24’s Solar Max.

If the thermosphere has indeed been breached and the inner core of our planet is abuzz with a polar shift accelerated by solar wind, then what possible effects could that have on the core and crust in totality?  Not just fault lines that can be connected like dots on graph paper?  Could Yellowstone’s ancient, restless magma be ready to bust at the seams?  Let’s hope not.

At this writing these mid-continent North American earthquakes are notable in both number and size, and all indications are that they’re growing.  Stay tuned!

STACE TUSSEL

PS – For all you armchair seismologists out there, take out your US map.  Put a dot on the map a bit west of Raton, NM and another dot just to the SE of West Yellowstone, MT, where two of the strongest US quakes in the last few days have happened.  Notice that the line runs through Craig, CO – where a good-sized quake made the news last August, 2009.  Hmmm…