Monday, December 29, 2008

Yellowstone earthquakes

Yellowstone National Park, a must-see for everybody, is best known for its geysers, but the park is really a giant volcano. Yellowstone's caldera takes up most of the land of the park.

And where there are volcanoes, there are usually earthquakes--so it should be any surprise that there have been a series of minor quakes within Yellowstone over the last few days.

Six years ago the Marathon Pundit family drove to Yellowstone, we stayed in a cabin just west of the park, in Montana, on the shores of Hebgen Lake, a reservoir of the Madison River.

A few miles upstream from Hebgen Lake is Quake Lake, which was formed after a 1959earthquake, which measured 7.3 on the Richer Scale, the strongest in recorded Montana history, triggered a landslide and created a natural resevoir.

Quake Lake, pictured in 2002, is located in the Gallatin National Forest. There's a small memorial and historic exhibit located along State Highway 287.

The earthquake caused 28 deaths, most of them campers.

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2 comments:

Jim Roper said...

Hey, wasn't Yellow Stone Nat'l Pk.
plagued by wild fires not too
long ago?

Marathon Pundit said...

That was in 1988, but when I was there in '02, it looked like the fires occurred just two or three years earlier.