Yellowstone National Park was rocked by an earthquake last night, sparking fears its supervolcano could be awakening.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) detected a magnitude 3.9 quake near Norris Geyser Basin, considered the Yellowstone Volcano, Tuesday at 8pm ET.
Seismic activity was felt in parts of Idaho, Montana and western Wyoming.
The USGS reported several aftershocks, with a magnitude 3.7 hitting early Wednesday morning.
Yellowstone is home to a supervolcano. It’s most recent volcanic eruption was a lava flow that occurred 70,000 years ago, while the last major eruption was 640,000 years ago.
But the USGS said: ‘The earthquake is typical of the Yellowstone region and not a sign of any significant unrest.’
The Norris Geyser Basin is located at the intersection of two faults that slip past each other, producing random earthquakes.
The largest quake to hit the area was a magnitude 6 in 1975, but the USGS reported there was little damage, no injuries and no volcanic eruption.
Yellowstone National Park sits in the northwest region of Wyoming and is home to bursting geysers, steam vents and bubbling pools.
At 3,472 square miles, the park is larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Most of the land is in Wyoming, but some of the park spills over into Montana and Idaho.
The Norris Geyser Basin is located at the northwestern tip of Wyoming.
Dozens of people issued shaking reports to the USGS following the early Wednesday morning earthquake.
But the USGS shows shakes were experienced in three states, captured by
Scientists investigating the Yellowstone supervolcano discovered movement deep in the crater this month, sparking fears the sleeping giant could erupt.
The volcano, located under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, is capable of producing a devastating magnitude 8 eruption.
Researchers analyzing the supervolcano’s crater, or caldera, found magma inside is moving northeast and shifting the concentration of volcanic activity along with it.
That means if the volcano were to erupt, it would happen in this area compared to previous warnings in the western region.
The Yellowstone Caldera is the 1,350-square-mile crater in the western-central portion of the park that formed when this volcano cataclysmically erupted hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The team found that the bulk of this magma is stored in segregated underground reservoirs, which prevents it from becoming concentrated enough to cause an eruption.
While an eruption could happen in the northeastern region due to the shift, researchers said their findings suggest that the supervolcano will not erupt within our lifetime.
‘Nowhere in Yellowstone do we have regions that are capable of eruption,’ lead author Ninfa Bennington, a research geophysicist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, told the Washington Post.
‘It has a lot of magma, but the magma is not connected enough.’
If the supervolcano erupted in one ‘big bang,’ some have suggested that the explosion could be equivalent to 875,000 megatons of TNT (million tons).
To put this in context, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Soviet Tsar Bomba, was 50 megatons — just a few thousandths of a percent of that power — and yet the Bomba was reported to have broken windows hundreds of miles away.
Thousands would die in pressure waves from a ‘big bang’ eruption of the caldera and it could cover much of the North American continent in up to a foot of ash.
Ash from these serial eruptions would blanket fields, destroy electric cables and collapse buildings, with deadly ‘drifts’ of ash leaving rescuers struggling, Michael Poland, Scientist-in-Charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, told DailyMail.com.
Areas closer to the eruption would be covered in over three feet of ash — including Salt Lake City, Utah; Boise, Idaho; and Missoula, Montana, he said.
The blasts’ huge clouds of ash and sulfur would also lower global temperatures, for years if not decades, which would impact agriculture in both the Americas and the world.
‘In any eruption of that size, there would be climate impacts,’ Poland said.
