Another Swarm of Earthquakes Noticed at Yellowstone National Park

January 19, 2010

It was just more than a year ago when a series of earthquakes shook and rattled Yellowstone National Park for enough days to raise volcanologists' eyebrows. Well, there's another swarm of quakes shaking the park, but so far the scientists say there's nothing unusual going on.

According to the University of Utah researchers, seismograph stations have been tracking an ongoing earthquake swarm in Yellowstone that began Sunday afternoon. The swarm is located about 10 miles northwest of Old Faithful and 9 miles southeast of West Yellowstone, Montana. The largest earthquake in the swarm as of 3 p.m. MST Tuesday was a magnitude 3.7 event that occurred roughly a half-hour earlier in the day.

There have been 469 located earthquakes in the swarm of magnitudes 0.5 to 3.7. This includes five events of magnitude larger than 3, with 34 events of magnitude 2 to 3, and 430 events of magnitude less than 2, park officials said in a release. There have been multiple personal reports of ground shaking from observations inside Yellowstone and in neighboring communities in Montana and Idaho for some of the larger events. Earthquake swarms of this nature are relatively common in Yellowstone, the release said.

At this time the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory does not consider the swarm to be unusual and the earthquakes are likely related to tectonic fault sources. Also there is no indication of premonitory volcanic or hydrothermal activity, but ongoing analyses will evaluate these different sources. Information on the earthquake can be viewed at the University of Utah
Seismograph Stations: http://www.seis.utah.edu/.

Seismograph recordings from stations of the Yellowstone seismograph station can be viewed online at: http://quake.utah.edu/helicorder/yell_webi.htm.

Anyone who has felt earthquakes in the swarm are encouraged to fill out a form on the USGS Community Felt reports web site: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/.

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