Whats going on at yellowstone?

reply to post by violet


Well that guy looks like some militia dude...he's probley rooting for it as he has a mole-hole in the mountains

Originally posted by j2000
It could be something as simple as an electronic signal conditioner from analog to digital and it's going out. It would cause a harmonic in these wave forms and be non consistant on start time and length depending on the load, and heat involved at that time.

good idea, wish i understood EE better myself ....

USGS PRESS RELEASE
Released: 1/7/2009 6:16:45 AM

The notable swarm of earthquakes that started December 26, 2008, beneath Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park has stopped for now and may have ceased entirely.

This sequence of more than 500 seismic events was most intense on December 27, 2008. The sequence included sixteen events of magnitude 3 to 3.9 and approximately 70 of magnitude 2 to 3 (as of Sunday afternoon, Jan. 4, 2009). Visitors and National Park Service employees in the Yellowstone Lake area reported feeling the largest of these earthquakes.

No damage was reported within Yellowstone National Park. The swarm was in an area of historic earthquake activity and was close to areas of hydrothermal activity on the lake floor. Similar large earthquake swarms have occurred in the past at Yellowstone, without triggering steam explosions or volcanic activity.

Listen to a podcast interview with Dr. Jacob Lowenstern, USGS Scientist-In-Charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, about how scientists monitor volcano and earthquake activity at: www.usgs.gov...

USGS

4.2
Date-Time Wednesday, January 07, 2009 at 11:44:04 UTC
Wednesday, January 07, 2009 at 02:44:04 AM at epicenter

Location 53.993°N, 165.241°W
Depth 94.5 km (58.7 miles) set by location program
Region FOX ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, ALASKA
Distances 40 km (25 miles) ESE (115°) from Akutan, AK
85 km (53 miles) E (82°) from Unalaska, AK
151 km (94 miles) SW (233°) from False Pass, AK
1216 km (756 miles) SW (236°) from Anchorage, AK

Wonder if this rang on any locals at YS? Some seem to think there's a link

reply to post by Hx3_1963


44.4 by -110.3 will put you right in the middle of the Caldera
with that Glovis website viewer.

reply to post by Ex_MislTech


To bad that Glovis is archived and not current / live...nice images though

Is anyone watching rsoe?
hisz.rsoe.hu...???=eng&lang=eng
The Eq's have been stacking up there in Alaska: are two alerts going off at once now. The last time they did that YS went on a bender and shook like mad....

Now where have I seen these patterns before....

June Lake - St. Helens
St. Helens - South Flank

Deja Vu

Originally posted by Hx3_1963
reply to post by violet

 

Well that guy looks like some militia dude...he's probley rooting for it as he has a mole-hole in the mountains

He apparantly has traumatic stess syndrome too and once sued the state of Wyoming. He may just have a personal vendetta. Might not even really be him either.

Not sure how a comment ends up in googlle's news, when nothing else was on the page in whatever the writer was replying to.

reply to post by xoxo stacie


That's what I was thinking when I posted that 4.2 a few ago...I'm watchin' GEE's to see if it propagates...

Good morning,
I have been following this thread since page 1 and I recall talk of the Juan de Fuca plate in the beginning pages . After seeing talk recently of the quakes in the other parts of the world being connected I took the following links and looked at them side by side and it looks to me like the plates are rubbing together . Just an observation.
Thank you
en.wikipedia.org...lates_tect2_en.svg[/url]http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/[/url]

Well, this was in the Jackson Hole Newspaper this morning.

www.jhguide.com...

Hi all,

I saw geogeek’s posts some pages back and found his input very helpful. Another perspective is always good. I follow what geogeek said about the regularity of the “pulses” that LKWY has been recording, and the suggestion that it has to be some kind of mechanical noise being picked up. Also saw the comments and suggestions listing the various possible sources, most of them relating to either cultural activity (eg snowmobiles, trucks) or a pump.

Well when I first noticed those “pulse” traces, I immediately wondered if they were mechanical, for exactly the same reasons that geogeek stated. I discarded the “cultural noise” argument for the same reason that others have, namely that these pulses have been going on around the clock and don’t fit that pattern. (I offer evidence for this later in this post.) Now, there is a type of pump that’s very common in areas of human habitation, especially where there’s a gas station, and there is a gas station in the Visitor Center area at that end of the lake. I worked nights for over six years at a Shell Service Station when I was a university student, and so I’m quite familiar with the way the pump compressor starts up automatically to replenish the pressure cylinder. It did it all night long, depending on how many customers stopped by to put air in their tires. Even when it was dead quiet it still started up for a little while, but not as often.

So naturally, I wondered if this was a trace of a gas station’s air compressor auto-starting, pressuring up the cylinder then shutting off. I discarded the notion, though, because if it were an air compressor, then why would it be running from two-hour-plus startups (even in the middle of the night when no-one’s there, most likely), down to one-hour intervals, and then down to little-over-half-hour intervals? (Again, even in the middle of the night.) When things are busy these compressors can be running almost non-stop. They start up every couple of minutes. But when it’s dead quiet (and in winter there’s honestly not much call for them in the middle of the night in a national park), they should be dropping back to their standby cycle, which is a startup every one or two hours or so for around a one- or two-minute run. This has not been what we are seeing, so it’s not (IMHO) an air compressor.

And anyway, that gas station is around 1 ½ miles away from the LKWY helicorder, so I don’t know if it would even pick it up. Perhaps it would, if it were the gas station’s air compressor. But I reckon it isn’t so it’s probably moot. (Feel free to disagree, of course. I really don’t mind…)

As for cultural noise, this helicorder reading from LKWY from Oct 28, 2008, is a good example of typical cultural noise traces. (From here on I’ll mainly use Mountain Time as it fits better with the discussion.) As you can see, prior to around 8:24 am, the trace is virtually a “flat line”, but then it picks up, and continues to show various activity until around lunch time where it quietens again, then it picks up a little and finally dies away to a flat line again after 5:30 pm. So, it would be hard to argue that most of what is shown is just cultural noise.

You’ll also note those suspicious “pulses” are totally absent in the morning hours prior to the time I stated. Ditto in the evening. So, I discard cultural noise as the cause. Round-the-clock occurrence over days, decreasing intervals? Nope, no cultural noise of any kind I can imagine. By the way, here is a real doozy of a helicorder page. You will (thankfully) not see many like this one, believe me. It’s from LKWY for July 4, 2008 and I’m posting the link for two reasons. First, because July 4th is a national holiday in the US, there shouldn’t be the “new day/going to work” type of cultural noise: garbage trucks, delivery trucks, people getting up early. You’d expect things to be quiet early in the morning but pick up as people start to fill the park, and being summer, you’d expect that noise to pretty busy until at least the early evening hours.

And that’s exactly how it looks. But if you are going “OMG, what is that??” at the trace which starts a little after 19:21 (7:21 pm MST) and is just huge and goes on for over twenty minutes, then don’t worry: at 2:12 a.m. on Saturday July 5 2008 (7:12 pm MST on July 4), there was a mag 7.7 quake in the sea of Okhostk, and what you are seeing there is the trace of that quake’s P-wave that arrived at Yellowstone 9 minutes or so later. It’s an excellent example of how big quakes get picked up over much of the world (except if you’re in a quake’s P-wave shadow zone) and how they can freak people out who are watching the seismographs but maybe don’t know what they’re really looking at. This one is worth bookmarking for comparison when the next big quake happens. And aren’t you glad you weren’t near that one when it happened? Whew!!

Anyhow, as you can see, there is no sign of that “pulse” activity either in the morning hours before people started getting around the place, or in the evening after they went home or back to their campsites. So, to repeat: I have my doubts that this “pulse” trace is mechanical. If it is, its source has yet to be determined but in my belief (which could well be wrong) it’s not the gas station’s compressor.

In the next post I’ll look more at when those “pulses” apparently first showed up. Contrary to what’s been stated by some members on the thread (including me! ), those pulses [Ii]did exist prior to the December swarm, and even before Dec 16 (which has also been mentioned). And yes, there was quite a bit of activity around Dec 16 as some mentioned many pages back and also more recently. The archives show it quite clearly.

Right now I need my second coffee…

Mike

Hi again,

Thanks to all who suffered through my previous post. This one will also be long but I hope that it will add something to what we are talking about. This post will also require some time to read as I’m presenting a lot of evidence that I respectfully suggest needs to be considered very carefully indeed.

Okay, so as I mentioned and contrary to what we have believed, those mysterious “pulse” traces on the LKWY helicorder existed prior to the December 2008 swarm and even prior to December, period. Now, while I have not done an exhaustive search of all the archives, the ones I posted links for in my earlier post today would suggest that if this “pulse” activity existed many months ago, it was not of a regular-enough form (and round-the-clock) to be noticeable, and therefore, even if similar “pulse” traces show up on occasion, their source/s could be entirely different and may not relate at all to what we have been seeing consistently in the past few days.

Basically I have done a search of each month, starting in July and working forward from there and choosing roughly one-week intervals to look for traces on LKWY that are consistent with its current form. I used the archives, but from now on I’ll post links to each helicorder trace that I mention so that you can check them all without hunting around through that archive unless you feel like it.

Take a look at the page from July 28 and compare it with July 29. Notice that odd pattern that appears in the early-morning hours on the latter one and continues until cultural noise washes it out? True, these traces are not identical to the ones we’ve been getting lately but they are interesting nonetheless, especially as they have a certain regularity to them.

So that got me wondering. Let’s look at August. Here’s the page for August 4. You’ll see that they were having technical problems as most of it is blank, but in those early-morning hours, we can see this same sort of pattern, but the traces (same scale used, please note) are not as strong as those we’ve been getting recently. So okay, we go on to what was just another random choice: Thursday, August 14. You can see that there’s almost no signs of such traces. Not enough to push an argument, anyway.

Let’s move along a couple of weeks, then, to Wed, August 27. (I mostly chose weekdays to pick up “work activity”. But in vacation season it’s pretty busy there all the time.) Ignore the cultural noise in the normal daylight hours and note that in the evening hours, those traces are back again. They are faint, so of pretty low intensity, but that “pulse” sort of pattern is discernible. Now we go into September, to Thursday the fourth. The “pulse” traces are there in the midnight to marning hours, get lost in the dayime activity, and do not re-appear with much strength at all afterwards. So, still not as consistent as we are getting now. But jump forward to Sept 24 and -- bingo. Now we are seeing stronger traces (but still not as strong as the last few days), but look how they are coming in at roughly quarter-hour intervals, even in the middle of the night. And they’re now round the clock.

This is when it starts to get interesting, because if we go forward a week to Oct 1 they’ve all but disappeared again. Makes me dubious that it’s a sump pump, you know. On Thursday Oct 9 they are there again but a bit more patchy. By Oct 15 they are barely discernible, if we can say that they exist at all. So whatever it is that is causing those “pulse” traces, apparently existed for some months before now, but it was not consistent, not as strong, and of varying regularity, with whole days passing by with nothing happening at all. In fact, if you check through the rest of October they seem to have fizzled out altogether.

Because we know that they did come back, I then began checking every day from Nov 1 onwards, and something very weird happened. On Tues Nov 4, the trace is a little more active than a flat line, then at 8:20 am MT it just stops. Blank. No trace. There is no graph at all for the fifth of November. (Hmmm… “Remember, remember, the 5th of November…” ATSers will know what I’m talking about. Others can dig around and find out… ) So the next available page is Thurs Nov 6. The trace re-starts at 5:30 am MT. And look what’s there: the “pulse” trace -- stronger now, and more like what we have been seeing. However, during much of the rest of November there are varying degrees of activity at all hours of the clock. Sometimes these “pulse” traces are there, sometimes they’re not. On Nov 28 for example, it would be hard to argue the case that they are there with any consistency at all -- or even if they are shown in any case.

(Continued in next post) Edit to fix link.



[edit on 7/1/09 by JustMike]

(Continued from previous post.)

Now we’re moving into December. If you go back to the archives link and click through the first few days, the traces go from showing no signs of our mystery “pulses” to hinting at them, until on Dec 6 they start to become clear and by the later evening they are absolutely definitive. They continue into Dec 7, die down on the 8th, and come back strongly again on Dec 9.

From then on, ladies and gentlemen (and others ), they are there pretty much all the time until things went kablooey late on Dec 21 and we lost the singal and in fact all the pages for Dec 22, 23, 24 and 25. Then, when the trace finally returned things started getting very messy and we very soon (and understandably) got distracted and focused on the quakes and not these funny little “pulses”. But now, with time to review, I think we need to take them very seriously indeed.

Summary: these “pulse” traces have been showing up on the LKWY helicorder for several months, at least since late July of 2008. In the earlier instances, they were patchy and very weak compared to the most recent days’ traces, and sometimes they vanished altogether. There have been occasions where they have grown stronger then disappeared again, but it is only in the last few days that they have developed this pattern of shorter intervals between events and also, it seems, a trend towards longer events. Even if these “pulses” disappear again, the evidence I have presented here shows that it in no way means they will not resume: quite the contrary, the pattern of activity indicated by the “pulse” traces strongly suggests that each time they return, their intensity increases and the activity goes on for a longer period of time.

My own non-professional opinion is that the evidence of the traces over the last several months is not consistent with either “cultural noise” or man-made, mechanical intereference and I have stated my reasons why. I believe that these “pulse” traces are being produced as the result of a natural event or a series of natural events, which are increasing in intensity and with a shorter time interval as time passes, and that this is therefore a matter of concern. While Dr Lowenstern has been quoted as saying that Dr Chouet has not mentioned identifying any “harmonic” traces from the Yellowstone events, this in no way changes my earlier opinion that these “pulse” traces might be indicators of “long period” events, because LP events are a completely separate entity from “harmonics”. I have stated this previously in the thread and referenced both links and images from sources (including Dr Chouet himself) that make this absolutely clear. So, while Dr Lowenstern’s statements vis-à-vis Dr Chouet and “harmonics” can be taken as read, this does not exclude the possibility that these “pulse” traces might be from LP events as no expert has yet even mentioned them (as existing or not) in relation to Yellowstone.

I believe they have not mentioned them because if these LP events exist, and if they increase in frequency and intensity over a period of time (as these traces have clearly been doing), Dr Chouet asserts that they are a definitive indicator of pressure buildup within a volcano and can ultimately indicate if that volcano will erupt or explode. I am not Dr Chouet so I can’t say for sure, but I would suggest we read very carefully between the lines of any statements that are released -- such as that one from Dr Lowenstern.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,
Mike

On this USGS page www.usgs.gov... the first thing you see is a video "Monitoring Yellowstone". You need a flash player to view it. I am at work and can't watch it here, so I have no idea what they say. If anyone watches it, can you post what it says, basically? Probably less than we already know!

But on the same page right underneath it is story that says the swarm of EQ's at YS is over for now, but that basically doesn't say much at all.

Originally posted by Shirakawa
Last 'geyser' activity started at 11:37, but it looks there have been some data transmission problems, as there is a segment with exactly zero signal in the seismograph. I hope LKWY doesn't black out like in the past days.

I have a question: should I calculate the interval between each 'geyser eruption' as the difference between the start time of two events, or the difference between the start time of the second and the end time of the first? How is it calculated with known geysers?

Last activity
Start time: 11:37:35
Duration time: 00:04:40
Interval since preceding event: 00:39:15

Probable next 'eruption': 12:12 MST

Intervals are always measured from start to start.
Duration is a completely separate measurement.

As each geyser eruption is a separate event, it might be an idea to plot each interval as a bar graph, with the bottom part of each bar used to plot the duration in a contrasting colour.

I very much appreciate the work you have done so far. You are a great asset to ATS.

Caz

Here's a Flash Animation of Quake Activity, overlayed on a overhead view of YS Lk...different I thought...

www.liveleak.com...

wow it's gotten eriely still around the world after all the activity of past hours/days...somethings gotta give, but where

[edit on 1/7/2009 by Hx3_1963]

I've been following this thread from the beginning, my applause on the diligent efforts of the group - I've gotten so educated I'm starting to wonder why I didn't take up Geology..

Anyway, I wondering if theres any way we can examine the Global statsticts for the last month to comparble times over the last year. We have the fish kill in Indonesia because of the quakes, obviously YS, couple those with the swarms in Alaska and the Middle East and I'm starting to wonder if something bigger than the caldera (ok thats creepy) is happening.

Does anyone have any idea where I could find Global Earthquake stats?

I was lucky enough to make a bit of money from a previous business venture, but it's hardly enough to retire on. Accordingly, I have to figure out where my next income is coming from and after some time off I was supposed to hit the ground running this past Monday.

However, I have been obsessively monitoring this thread instead of working on the dual task of either looking for funding for a new company or a job. Didn't seem worth the effort if the world were about the explode.

I feel sufficiently comfortable that it's not imminent enough to continue to derail me from my regularly scheduled life. And so this morning I leave you very capable people to follow events. I thank you for the contributions, thought and information. Impressive bunch (for the most part.)

If nothing monumental happens, I'll catch up over the weekend. Until then, good hunting!