Blog

By: Michael de Yoanna

Category: Health, Panorama

Posted: January 22, 2010 11:28 AM

Tags: CODY ENGELHAUPT, PEOPLE

What Yellowstone's Mini-Quakes Mean for Colorado

The dormant super volcano under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming is not a mountain. It's a vast depression in the Earth with eruptions that are separated not by centuries, but by hundreds of thousands of years. It's what fuels the park's thousands of spewing geysers, steam vents, and hot springs, which attract three million awestruck people each summer (via Discovery). The volcano could be our undoing. If it erupts, a massive force of destruction impacting Colorado and the rest of the world would be unleashed, as a Discovery dramatization shows (here's a promotional spot for it). The volcano and its "2012"-like potential are relevant this morning because more than 900 mini-earthquakes have been tracked since Sunday by Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (via 9News). The largest was a magnitude 3.8 quake, which is far smaller than the 7.0 that left the Hatian capital a pile of rubble. Scientists say there's no evidence of volcanic reaction, but because of what's happened in Haiti, that won't stop people from conspiring about possible earthquake/super-volcano connections and the End Times. But keep those theories in check. Montana's Bozeman Daily Chronicle points out that although an earthquake swarm sounds ominous, they're quite normal in Yellowstone.

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