EARTHQUAKE SWARM! YELLOWSTONE ASPLODE! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!1!!*

*(OR NOT!)

You may have heard, and they may have included some PSH in the news report, that there has been a swarm of earthquakes in the area of the Yellowstone Caldera.

Hold on a there. The what? A what?

Yellowstone Caldera: a volcano that hasn't gone off in, oh, for ever, as far as anyone remembers, and at least a jillion years according to the geology. By the way, it's about 34 miles by 45 miles across, and lies in three different states. Looky, color pictures and everything! Note: the pink stuff is the open mouth of an old volcano. If it were to all blow up again, your iPod would be useless! zOMG! (also, you would likely join the rest of the population of the world in death)

(click to embiggen)


The fabulous hydrothermal features at yellowstone (e.g. ""old faithful")? Caused by the planet not being stable? Yeah, those are still a work in progress. Lately there has been a somewhat alarming-sounding uplift of the ground in one part of the area (3"/year under a lake) and now we have what the Official Scientists in White Lab Coats call a "swarm" of earthquakes.

No, really.

So you get to pick the news you want to believe. Either we are all going to be blown to smithereens or die under ashes, or we are all going to be fine just like the last time there was an earthquake swarm in Yellowstone.

For more information about ongoing volcanic activity around the world, including a software package that predicts with 95%+ accuracy when and where a volcano will erupt, click here.

So what's the official word?

The U.S. Geological Survey, University of Utah and National Park Service scientists with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory "see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at Yellowstone in the foreseeable future. Recurrence intervals of these events are neither regular nor predictable."

(it probably won't go off, and we couldn't say if it will or not, but thanks for funding us!)