Yellowstone earthquake swarm..., page 1

Hey everyone....

Here's a post about so far nothing more than an enigmatic headline on The Drudge Report.

Today there was a headline toward the rightside middle stating "Earthquake Swarm Strikes Yellowstone." When you click on the link, it's dead -- no article or other info.

For those curious, here's the link It's a newspaper in the Yellowstone area. From all appearances, it seems the paper pulled the story. It's not on the link above, and a search at the paper's main site fails to turn up the story.

For those of you unfamiliar, Yellowstone (as in the national park, and yes, Old Faithful geisure), is one of the many environmental doomsday scenarios that have some scientists worried. Yellowstone is a caldera volcano, in essence a volcano without the patented cone mountaintop. Instead, past eruptions have formed a crater.

What caldera's become are some of the most destructive volanos the world has ever faced. When these eruptions occur, they spew ejecta from not just a concentrated area, but from miles and miles -- at times hundreds of miles across.

And worldwide, Yellowstone is one of the worst potentials out there....

A full-scale eruption of the Yellowstone caldera could result in millions of deaths locally and catastrophic climatic effects globally...

When Yellowstone Caldera (last) erupted 640,000 years ago it released 1,000 cubic kilometers of material, covering all of North America in up to two meters of debris. By comparison, when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it released 1.2 cubic kilometers of ejecta.

The ecologial disaster from a Yellowstone eruption cannot be fathomed. We're talking hell-on-earth scenes of destruction and a struggle to survive in a post-eruption world that creates a perpetual winter.

Even small caldera-forming eruptions, such as Krakatoa in 1883 or Mount Pinatubo in 1991, may result in significant local destruction and a noticeable drop in temperature around the world. Large calderas may have even greater effects.

The three eruptions happened 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, and the most recent such eruption produced the Lava Creek Tuff 640,000 years ago and spread a layer of volcanic ash over most of the North American continent.

And some scientists maintain we are overdue for the next one.....

That's why the "earthquake swarm" is so unnerving. It could be an indication that pressure is building up underneath the ground in the magma chambers. A typical hallmark of a pre-volcanic eruption are shallow, localized earthquake swarms.

Now, on the positive side, earthquake swarms are not unknown in the region, and have yet to lead to any eruption. But this is just another in a series of alarming events in the Yellowstone region during the past decade, including a "bubbling" of Yellowstone Lake's dome as the crust rises from an increase in pressure; gas vents opening in areas previously safe, killing streams of wildlife, particularly moose; and an increase in frequency in the earthquake swarms.

Of all the potentials out there, this one worries me the most because of its lethal reality, and the fact that there are signs pointing to a potential explosion. And unlike nuclear war and even to a lesser extent a comet impact that we can predict far out from the event date and potentially deflect, the Yellowstone eruption could come without warning, and with very little possibility to mitigate or control.

Let's hope this post comes for nothing....