Live action at Yellowstone (over the past 20 years, just a blink of an eye in volcano years), which is starting to do the supervolcano version of heavy breathing, leaving the poor Tetons acting like over-50 heaving bosoms after reading a torrid romance novel!
Someone needs to blow some cold air over those Tetons, a good Arctic blast, to get them to perk up!
Woo woo!
Link: Activity discovered at Yellowstone supervolcano - LiveScience - MSNBC.com.
Activity discovered at Yellowstone supervolcano
Caldera bulged and deflated significantly during study period
Wyoming's Teton Range looms behind a Global Positioning System antenna in Jackson Hole.
Jamie Farrell, University of UtahBy Sara GoudarziStaff WriterUpdated: 2 hours, 6 minutes agoOne of the largest supervolcanoes in the world lies beneath Yellowstone National Park and scientists say activity there is increasing.
Though the Yellowstone system, which spans parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, is active and expected to eventually blow its top, scientists don’t think it will erupt any time soon. Supervolcanoes can sleep for centuries or millennia before producing incredibly massive eruptions that can drop ash across an entire continent.
Yet significant activity continues beneath the surface. And the activity has been increasing lately, scientists have discovered. In addition, the nearby Teton Range, in a total surprise, is getting shorter.
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For the past 17 years, researchers used GPS satellites to monitor the horizontal and vertical motion of the Yellowstone caldera — a huge volcanic crater formed by a super-eruption more than 600,000 years ago.
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The 45-by-30-mile caldera bulged and deflated significantly during the study period.
“We think it’s a combination of magma being intruded under the caldera and hot water released from the magma being pressurized because it’s trapped,” said lead study author Robert Smith from the University of Utah. “I don’t believe this is evidence for an impending volcanic eruption, but it would be prudent to keep monitoring the volcano.”
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Data shows that the caldera floor sank 4.4 inches from 1987 until 1995. From 1995 until 2000, the northwest rim of the caldera rose about 3 inches, followed by another 1.4-inch rise until 2003. Then between 2000 and 2003, the caldera floor sank a little more than an inch.
And then from 2004 to 2006 the central caldera floor rose faster than ever, springing up nearly 7 inches during the three-year span.
“The rate is unprecedented, at least in terms of what scientists have been able to observe in Yellowstone,” Smith said.
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Typically, when a big earthquake takes place on a normal fault such as Teton, the ground is pulled apart. This kind of extension or stretching causes valleys to drop downward and mountains to rise upwards. Thousands of earthquakes over millions of years built the mountains that comprise the Teton Range today.
But recent measurements showed a different trend. Researchers found that just the opposite is happening with Jackson Hole — the valley below the Teton. The valley is rising up slowly and the mountains are dropping down.
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What the researchers think is happening, on a short-term basis at least, is that the bulging Yellowstone hotspot north of the Tetons is pushing against the north edge of Jackson Hole and jamming it against the mountains. (This is also causing the southwest part of the Yellowstone plateau, under the hotspot, to slide downhill at a rate of one-sixth of an inch each year.).
“The textbook model for a normal fault is not what’s happening at the Teton fault,” Smith said. “The mountains are going down relative to the valley going up. That’s a total surprise.”
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So let me see if I get this right... Yellowstone's bulging hotspot is going down on Jackson Hole... but in the meantime, it's jamming itself against those not-so-perky Tetons...
Sounds to me like there are some geographic fixtures with a little too much pent-up primal earthy energy, in need of some release!
Whose fault do you think this is, anyway?!
Not GWB's, he's been f**king the planet for six years straight.
Posted by: Sterling "Chip" Camden | March 15, 2007 at 05:03 PM