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Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming was hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of 3.3, one of many earthquakes that the park is assailed with every year. According to local news sites and the US Geological Survey (USGS) May 8, 2011. ... A 7.5 magnitude earthquake, which occurred in 1959, near the Hebgen Lake though, had killed 28 people. According to geologists however, the Yellowstone caldera itself is unlikely to experience large earthquakes because the weakened bedrock is less likely to burst due to high subsurface temperatures.

A swarm of mostly imperceptible earthquakes continues to shake Yellowstone National Park in what is now the park’s second-largest on record. From the swarm’s beginnings on Jan. 17 through Monday morning, some 1,620 quakes were recorded by seismologists in the park, which sits atop a gigantic volcanic caldera. The activity is centered around the northwest corner of the Yellowstone caldera, in the back-country between West Yellowstone, Mont., and Old Faithful.

Since January 17, 2010 Yellowstone has had the second largest swarm ever recorded. The swarms have been steady at about 10 miles in depth and they have subsided a few days ago. In the past two days the depth has raised up to around 7 miles and in the past couple hours quakes vastly increased. http://www.quake.utah.edu/helicorder/ymr_webi.htm http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/111-44.html Remember this doesn’t mean we will see an eruption and it most likely means a normal volcano. It is very unlikely we will see a caldera eruption. But these changes are significant and cannot be over looked Some history: Since the most recent...

Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 22:43:34 UTC Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 03:43:34 PM at epicenter Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones Location 44.565°N, 110.972°W Depth 6.5 km (4.0 miles) Region YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING Distances 15 km (9 miles) SE (136°) from West Yellowstone, MT 30 km (19 miles) ENE (76°) from Island Park, ID 56 km (35 miles) SSW (201°) from Gardiner, MT 430 km (267 miles) N (10°) from Salt Lake City, UT Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 0.3 km (0.2 miles); depth +/- 1.4 km (0.9 miles) Parameters NST= 24, Nph= 24, Dmin=11 km, Rmss=0.14 sec,...

Yellowstone National Park has been rattled by more than 250 earthquakes in the past two days following a period of 11 months of quiet seismic activity in the park. The quakes have been gaining strength, with a 3.1 tremor recorded at 11:03 a.m. today. A 2.9 quake was recorded at 12:38 p.m. Prof. Robert B. Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Utah and one of the leading experts on earthquake and volcanic activity at Yellowstone, said that the activity is a "notable swarm." "The swarm is located about 10 miles northwest of Old Faithful, Wyo., and nine miles southeast...

Responding to dozens of requests from the public, the Defense Department has released 146 more photos from the infamous Air Force One flyover that struck fear in thousands of unsuspecting New Yorkers in April. The photos are posted right on the Pentagon's Website, defense officials said today. The Pentagon also released a heavily redacted flight manifest. The April 27 photo-op caused quite a fright in Lower Manhattan and New Jersey, as many people who had lived through the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks thought the city was again under siege. Workers poured out of office buildings as the planes buzzed the...

Louis Caldera, the former White House Military Office chief who quit last month after approving that bizarre Air Force One photo op over Manhattan that frightened countless New Yorkers, has landed a job. He'll be a senior fellow focusing on higher education and national security matters at the Center for American Progress, run by John Podesta, a co-chairman of Obama's transition team. Obama aides said at the time that the president was furious about the April 27 flyover, which included an Air Force One understudy and two F-16 military fighter aircraft flying over the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan,...

Former University of New Mexico President Louis Caldera - who resigned as director of the White House Military Office last month following an Air Force One photo op gone wrong - has a new gig. The Center for American Progress, a self-described "progressive" think tank founded by John Podesta, a former chief-of-staff to President Clinton, has hired Caldera to work on higher education and national security issues. Caldera, a former U.S. Army secretary, will make a strong addition to the staff, Podesta said.

A White House military aide who authorized an Air Force flyover of New York that caused panic among some people in the city resigned on Friday. Louis Caldera said in a resignation letter to Obama that the controversy over the mission -- a photo shoot of a jumbo jet used as Air Force One with the Statue of Liberty in the background -- made it impossible for him to lead the White House Military Office (WHMO). White House officials said the flight was designed to update the official photo of the plane, known as Air Force One when the president...

The director of the White House Military Office submitted his resignation on Friday, less than two weeks after he authorized a flyover by an Air Force One backup of the Statue of Liberty that terrified thousands of people in New York City. Louis Caldera, who served as the secretary of the Army in the Clinton administration, apologized for the “distraction” that approving the flyover caused. He said in a brief letter to President Obama on Friday that it “has made it impossible for me to effectively lead the White House Military Office.”

WASHINGTON, May 8, 2009 – The director of the White House Military Office has submitted his resignation in the wake of an April 27 aerial photo shoot with a presidential aircraft over New York City. Louis Caldera, who served as secretary of the Army during the Clinton administration, resigned his office effective May 22. “I have concluded that the controversy surrounding the Presidential Airlift Group’s aerial photo shoot over New York City has made it impossible to effectively lead the White House Military Office,” Caldera wrote in his letter of resignation. President Barack Obama has accepted the resignation, White House...

White House Military Office Chief Resigns Over Plane Flyover Flap Louis Caldera, the man who organized the low-flying Air Force One plane that panicked New York City, delivered his resignation Friday as the White House released a photo of the plane.

WASHINGTON � A top White House aide resigned Friday for his role in Air Force One's $328,835 photo-op flyover above New York City that sparked panic and flashbacks to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Louis Caldera said the controversy had made it impossible for him to effectively lead the White House Military Office. "Moreover, it has become a distraction in the important work you are doing as president," Caldera said in his resignation letter to President Barack Obama.

Finally! After our demanding for the last two weeks that the plotter of the Hudson terror plane, Louis Caldera, be fired, he's gone. In a classic (classic!) Friday afternoon news dump, The White House confirms that Louis Caldera is out. Technically, the President "accepted his resignation". We assume that means he was canned. If you don't recall, it was Caldera's bright idea fo fly Air Force One around lower Manhattan and New Jersey, prompting several buildings to be evacuated out of fear that we were witnessing a repeat of 9/11. That Caldera's term on the job would end like this...

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has repeatedly refused to rule out Caldera's dismissal for authorizing Monday's Air Force One photo op fiasco that sent panicked New Yorkers running through the streets of lower Manhattan. But the drumbeat for his dismissal seems to be growing louder. The national television media was all over it again this morning, and Gibbs called the photo-op "stupid" during a press briefing on Air Force One. Gibbs was asked this morning if President Obama "regrets" anything during his first 100 days. Gibbs cited the flyover, and only the flyover. Not a good sign for Caldera....

WASHINGTON -- It didn't take long for former University of New Mexico President Louis Caldera to make headlines in his new job, taking responsibility Monday for terrifying New Yorkers with a government photo op gone wrong. Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, apologized for a federal flyover fiasco in lower Manhattan that sent New Yorkers into the streets in fear of another 9/11-style attack. Caldera served as U.S. Army secretary under President Clinton and became UNM president in 2003. As director of the White House Military Office, he coordinates all military support for the White House. He oversees...

NY Post: The planes flew over the Verrazano Bridge, buzzed the left ear Lady Liberty and then continued up the Hudson past Jersey City and then circling back toward Staten Island, federal sources told the Post. Thousands flooded the streets downtown as buildings called evacuations.

The gradual uplift of Yellowstone National Park's caldera is pushing the earth's crust southwest along the Snake River Plain, affecting much of the Great Basin. "It adds energy to the whole system that we see," said Bob Smith, a University of Utah geophysicist who works with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. "It adds to the whole deformation and expands the Great Basin to the west."

So Yellowstone, the super volcano, is again rumbling? Mercury has been detected throughout the national park (not a good sign) for quite sometime and along with it the ground under Yellowstone Lake is rising. More than 250 earthquakes reported during a 24-hour period ... Scientists monitoring Yellowstone have stated that it has entered into what they have described as a "red zone." Remember Mount St. Helens? The feds warned folks in the region around the mountain to vacate, and most did. Some (a few) didn't. It's been reported that the feds will issue a vacate order to the inhabitants of...

With the increased seismic activity in the Yellowstone Caldera, it is likely that there is some increased interest in in the geology of the area. Here are some resources that should be of interest. First, we have a fairly recent peer reviewed publication on the "Super Volcano" known as Yellowstone, including some discussion of just what a "Super Volcano" is. The largest scale of volcanic eruptions, the so-called super-eruptions, can destroy all living beings and infrastructure over tens of thousands of square kilometres, can disrupt agriculture over millions of square kilometres and can alter global climate for years or decades....

A Yellowstone earthquake update: 1) The rumbling continues, including 3.5, 3.0 and 3.2 quakes just today 2) Here is some more Jake Lowenstern (the Yellowstone volcano scientist) analysis (via TIME): Jake Lowenstern, Ph.D.,YVO's chief scientist, who also is part of the USGS Volcano Hazards Team, told TIME that it doesn't appear a supervolcano event is imminent. "We don't think the amount of magma exists that would create one of these large eruptions of the past," he said. "It is still possible to have a volcanic eruption comparable to other volcanoes. But we would expect to see more and larger quakes,...

More on the Yellowstone earthquake swarm at the supervolcano caldera. First, this piece of database analysis from an IT guy at Splunk puts the swarm into scary perspective: I'm sending you this email with some information I've gleaned from the USGS archives. I'm analyzing the ANSS data (http://www.ncedc.org/cnss/) in an install of Splunk, which is a timeline based search and reporting engine. I have 30 years of data in the system, with about 2M quakes total. It makes doing graphs and adhoc investigations faster than dealing with the USGS limited search forms. Disclaimer: I work for Splunk as their evangelist,...

Okay, I'll start: 1) Blagojevich walks scott free 2) My salary continues to remain stagnate 3) The bailout results in a massive debt to taxpayers with zero benefit to them 4) Iran aquires nuclear weapons and we (including Bush) failed to do anything about it 5) Jamie Gertz continue's to become even more attractive as she ages

A swarm of small earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park is the most intense measured there in years, leaving scientists puzzled.

<p>YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) - The University of Utah Seismograph Stations report a swarm of small earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park.</p> <p>The university says the quakes of magnitude 3.5 and lower have been occurring beneath Yellowstone Lake, five to nine miles south-southeast of Fishing Bridge, a park landmark. The earthquakes that began on Friday and continued on Saturday intensified during the weekend, and there were reports that people in the Yellowstone Lake area felt the quakes.</p>

-SNIP-Obama today announced that former UNM President Louis Caldera will serve as Director of the White House Military Office. In his new post, Caldera will coordinate all military support for Presidential operations. -SNIP- Also, according to the news release, Caldera has had a "30-year career as a soldier, lawyer, legislator, high ranking government official, university president and professor of law." Caldera, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a former member of the California Assembly and a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He earned his law and business degrees at Harvard University in 1987,...

The U.S. government eagerly reached out to Venezuelan presidential candidate Hugo Chavez in 1998 and moved quickly to denounce a rumored coup plot against the man who's become one of the Bush administration's archenemies, newly declassified State Department documents obtained by McClatchy Newspapers reveal. State Department officials initially appeared dazzled by Chavez's oversized persona and his promise for sweeping reforms, and seemed sincere in their efforts to help him, the documents show. Some of those overtures drew positive responses from Chavez, who said he wanted U.S. help in fighting corruption and drug trafficking.... ...A Jan. 20, 1999, cable setting the...

Magma surge causes record rise at Yellowstone 19:00 08 November 2007 NewScientist.com news service Catherine Brahic The remains of the Yellowstone supervolcano in the US is huffing and puffing and rising by up to 7 centimetres a year, say researchers. They speculate this rise is caused by a mass of molten rock the size of Los Angeles being forced from the Earth’s mantle into the magma chamber beneath the ancient volcano. But the researchers, led by Wu-Lung Chang of the University of Utah in the US, caution that the movement does not mean an explosion is imminent. Calderas – the...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Norman Caldera has asked Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to butt out of his country's political affairs after Chavez signed a favorable oil pact with dozens of leftist Nicaraguan mayors. Peru and a Mexican presidential candidate also have recently accused Chavez of interfering in internal affairs. Chavez agreed last month to ship 10 million barrels of fuel a year at preferential prices to 51 Nicaraguan communities, many of them allied with the party of Sandinista presidential candidate Daniel Ortega. He also made a donation of 10,000 tons of urea to Sandinista farming organizations, Caldera said....

NASA Earth Observatory has this neat graph of the lawn area in the United States. It's a very close match to the "night light" image made a couple of years ago. I linked the little picture below to the bigger one (which is only 380 K). Click on the link for the accompanying article. Yann-Arthus Bertrand took this impressive photograph of the "crater lake" inside the caldera from the Pinatubo eruption of 1991:

Just had a good size quake here in Southwestern Montana. I live very close to Yellowstone National Park. Was wondering if any other freepers felt it in MT. or WY.?

Link post: to see the images (and discuss them), go to the thread in the General/Chat section: Geology Picture of the Week, July 17-23, 2005: Crater Lake After I posted the original thread, I realized that one reason I thought of this (other than my trip) was the News/Current Events item, the release of the Oregon State Quarter:

The view from space: and underwater: and classically:

Link post: access the images and thread (for discussion and commentary) in the Chat section. Special appeal to Arizona residents to examine the Grand Canyon image to see if they can identify a strange feature noted there! Geology Pictures of the Week, Nov 28 - Dec 4, 2004: Southwest U.S. Geology from Space

Two GREAT views of the Grand Canyon and Bandelier NM and environment. Arizonans, I'd like you to check the larger version of the Arizona image and see if you can identify a particular weird feature. (See below the image for my question.) Click on each image to see the larger version. Grand Canyon in Snow (Larger version is 2.1 MB.) In the larger version, to the west of the lower Grand Canyon and southeast of Lake Mohave and a small mountain range, there's a flat light-brown patch. Does anyone know what that is, or is it an image artifact? Bandelier...

(click picture for full-size version; go to link above for some really great ones, but I couldn't grab them because the site uses frames) This picture is actually from this page: Grimsvotn eruption November 2nd 2004

Link post: any discussion posts should be posted in the thread linked below. This post is to alert readers who might possibly be interested to the post in the FR 'chat' section. You can skip the thread and go directly to the site by clicking on the article link above. Geology Picture of the Week, March 21-27, 2004: Superb Yellowstone site (with geyser videos).

An Open Letter from the USENIX Association Regarding SCO's Position on Open Source Software The SCO Group, Inc. (SCO), has recently sued IBM and Novell and launched broad attacks on the legality of and the economic justification for so-called open source licensing, including the free licensing of Linux (see SCO's open letter to Congress). As an organization dedicated to advancing the skills and contributions of computer researchers and developers, the USENIX Association is compelled to address and refute the position SCO has taken regarding open source software. USENIX is sending this letter (PDF) to Congress. SCO letter link http://www.osaia.org/letters/sco_hill.pdf Usenix...

Link post, to alert interested readers to the post in the FR "chat" section, where comments should be posted (i.e., click the link, and if you want to comment, comment there): Geology Picture of the Week, February 15-22, 2004

Two pictures from one of my favorite Web sites (continuing an unintended Pacific Northwest theme). The first shows a reconstruction of approximately Mount Mazama would have looked like had it not been for the immense eruption that formed Crater Lake. The second is one of the few I've ever seen that shows the clarity of the lake's water. The linked Web site takes you to the Stromboli On-Line Crater Lake "virtual tour" site.

Scientists CloselyMonitoring YellowstoneProLiberty.com12-23-3   Recent eruptions, 200 degree ground temperatures, bulging magma and 84 degree water temperatures prompt heightened srutiny of park's geothermal activity...  BILLINGS, Mont. -- Yellowstone National Park happens to be on top of one of the largest "super volcanoes" in the world. Geologists claim the Yellowstone Park area has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago making the next one long overdue. This next eruption could be 2,500 times the size of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under...

ELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. — The rolling pine forests, snowcapped mountains and crisp fall evenings here tend to make people forget the fact that the park sits atop a huge simmering underground volcano. But new geologic events have served up reminders.In a few days in July, acidic ground water dissolved parts of the unpaved trails in the Norris Geyser Basin, and the ground temperature of the trails shot up to 200 degrees from the usual maximum of 80. Park officials closed nearly half of the basin's trails, and they remain shut. On Aug. 21, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake shook the...

Outside and in-house legal counsel advised the SCO Group to send a warning letter about Linux use to the CEOs of 1,350 companies Monday, SCO CEO Darl McBride says. In a letter dated May 12, SCO Group, which holds the license to the original AT&T Unix operating system, warned commercial users of the open-source Linux operating system that "Linux infringes on our Unix intellectual property and other rights." McBride also said in the letter that "legal liability that may arise from the Linux development process may also rest with the end user." In an interview Thursday, McBride said the company,...