Yellowstone Volcano latest: Grand Teton National Park closed due to fissure | Science | News
The giant crack in the Wyoming–based national park has prompted officials to shut down areas from tourists in case of landslides.
The Grand Teton National Park said in a statement: “The Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point areas are currently closed due to elevated potential for rockfall.
“The area was closed to protect human safety on July 10 after expanding cracks in a rock buttress were detected.
“It is unknown how long the closure will be in effect. Geologists are monitoring the buttress for movement and have initiated a risk assessment for the area.”
It is currently unclear how the crack opened but it is likely due to normal seismic activity in the national park area.
Despite being around 100 kilometres from the Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton does sit over the Yellowstone supervolcano.
If it was seismic activity beneath Grand Teton which caused the fissure, it could be a sign that Yellowstone is reawakening.
If the Wyoming volcano were to erupt an estimated 87,000 people would be killed immediately and two-thirds of the USA would immediately be made uninhabitable.
The large spew of ash into the atmosphere would block out sunlight and directly affect life beneath it creating a “nuclear winter”.
The massive eruption could be a staggering 6,000 times as powerful as the one from Washington’s Mount St Helens in 1980 which killed 57 people and deposited ash in 11 different states and five Canadian provinces.
If the volcano explodes, a climate shift would ensue as the volcano would spew massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which can form a sulphur aerosol that reflects and absorbs sunlight.
As Always, do your research — many conflicting reports:
Yellowstone Evacuated: Experts Claim ‘Super Volcano’ Could Erupt Within Weeks
By Chudasi Delhi – Published: 08/03/2014 – Section: WorldYellowstone National Park has been hastily evacuated as fear of the Yellowstone Caldera’s eruption is deemed to be approaching sooner than previously expected. Researchers on-site claim that the 640,000 year-old super volcano has exhibited a sudden spike of activity which indicates that it could erupt in as little as two weeks. The explosion caused by the volcano would very well throw all of United States into a 200 year long volcanic winter, with ash blotting out the sun, and pyroclastic flow irreparably damaging the surrounding ecosystem.
The scientific community is split on when exactly the volcano will erupt. Some say weeks, while other camps suggest that it could be several months. One thing they all agree on, however, is that it will happen very, very soon. Senior Volcanologist Richard Dunn gave the following report in regards to the volcano’s alarming activity. “This is something which could have never been accurately determined ahead of time. This unpredictable flux of activity is quite concerning, and flies in the face of all our previous studies in regards to this particular volcano. Our chief concern at this point is getting people to safety.”
We just had a tsunami-triggering 8.2 earthquake off of Chile’s north coast, a 5.8 earthquake off the coast of Panama, a 5.1 earthquake in southern California, and a dormant volcano in Peru has awakened for the first time in 40 years, but scientists assure us that none of these events are related and that we don’t have anything to be concerned about. Even though all of these events took place on the Ring of Fire, which is the most seismically-active area of the entire planet, the “experts” promise us that “the odds are overwhelming” that they are not related to one another. So do you believe them?
A few days ago, I wrote an article entitled “12 Signs That Something Big Is Happening To The Earth’s Crust Under North And South America“. This was before the earthquakes that struck off the coasts of Chile and Panama. It appeared to me, as a “non-expert”, that seismic activity was really starting to heat up in North and South America – especially along the Ring of Fire. But it turns out that I and everyone else that was concerned about all of these earthquakes was flat wrong. According to the experts, it is just a giant coincidence that earthquakes are popping off like firecrackers all along the west coasts of North and South America.
Just ask John Vidale. He is a “seismologist” at the University of Washington-Seattle. He says that “the odds are overwhelming” that these earthquakes are not related to one another…
“The odds are overwhelming that they’re not related,” said John Vidale, a seismologist with the University of Washington-Seattle, about the deadly magnitude-8.2 quake near Chile late Tuesday and the magnitude-5.8 quake near Panama on Wednesday.
And another “scientist”, Robert Muir-Wood, tells us that there is “no evidence” that activity in one area of the Ring of Fire can affect activity in another area of the Ring of Fire.
“There is no evidence of linkages in activity between different regions around the Ring of Fire,” said Robert Muir-Wood, a scientist with RMS, a catastrophe modeling firm.
So if you are convinced that “the Ring of Fire is roaring to life”, you are just being delusional according to them.
For those that are not familiar with the Ring of Fire, it is basically a giant ring around the Pacific Ocean. It contains approximately 75 percent of the volcanoes in the world, and approximately 90 percent of all earthquakes occur inside of it. Here is some more about the Ring of Fire from a recent Global Post article…
Known as the Ring of Fire, its fault lines run up the entire western coast of the Americas, from Patagonia to Alaska, and then heading southward again below the eastern Pacific, eventually ending between Asia and Australia. Of the 10 most powerful quakes listed by the US Geological Survey (USGS), all but one took place around the Ring of Fire. That accurately reflects the numbers, with 90 percent of all the world’s tremblers taking place here. The Ring of Fire is also home to most of the world’s active volcanoes.
People were becoming extremely worried, because during the month of March there were hundreds of significant earthquakes along the coast of Chile. The concern was that this was leading up to something big. And sure enough, a massive 8.2 earthquake struck the other night.
Since the 8.2 quake, there have been dozens of aftershocks measuring magnitude 4.0 or greater.
But of course Chile is not the only area along the Ring of Fire that has been unusually active.
There have been several dozen significant earthquakes in Peru over the past month, including a 6.3 earthquake that made headlines all over the planet. And as I mentioned above, a major volcano in Peru that has been dormant for about 40 years is now roaring back to life.
And the west coast of North America has also been witnessing some very strange seismic activity lately.
In early March, northern California was shaken by a 6.9 earthquake. It was the worst earthquake to hit northern California in about four years.
Later in March, a 5.1 earthquake rattled Los Angeles pretty badly. It had been a long time since L.A. had seen anything like that.
Farther north, Mount Hood up in Oregon has experienced more than 100 earthquakes in recent days. Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned that an eruption may be coming.
But according to the experts, the fact that all of this is happening at the same time is just a giant coincidence.
They assure us that there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.
Hopefully they are right.
Hopefully things will settle down and go back to normal.
None of us should want to see the kind of death and destruction that massive earthquakes could potentially bring to our coastal cities.
But as I discussed in my article about the Yellowstone supervolcano the other day, it would be foolish to willingly ignore the warning signs.
Many of the experts would have us believe that seismic activity is completely “random” and that there is no pattern to it.
However, history has shown that seismic activity tends to happen in waves. When there is one event, the probability that there will be another event becomes greater. And when things have been quiet for an extended period of time, the probability that things will continue to be quiet becomes greater.
Unfortunately, it appears that we have now entered a period of heightened seismic activity in North and South America – particularly along the Ring of Fire.
Hopefully this particular wave of seismic activity will be short-lived and will soon cool down.
Yellowstone Wolves Show How Animals Change With Nature
Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 01 December 2011 Time: 02:00 PM ET
Sibling members of Yellowstone National Park’s Druid Peak Pack engaged in play.
CREDIT: Daniel Stahler/NPS
Environmental changes have a profound effect not only on animal populations but on traits of the animals themselves, in ways that are difficult to understand and predict, new research suggests.
By studying the wolves of Yellowstone National Park, a group of researchers has developed a new model for understanding how both ecological and evolutionary traits of an animal population change as the environment does.
The researchers recorded and studied data from Yellowstone for more than 15 years, including the body size and coat color of wolves as well as their sharply fluctuating population, which last year stood at 97.
“The conclusions that we have been able to draw is that biologists should stop treating population size independently of population characteristics. As changes, it invariably changes the ecology and evolution of species,” study researcher Tim Coulson, of Imperial College London, told LiveScience.
The study appears in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Science.
Yellowstone wolves
An international group of wolf experts, geneticists and statisticians began collecting data from Yellowstone when, absent from the park for 70 years, wolves were reintroduced in 1995 and 1996. The reintroduced population of 40 grew to nearly 180 wolves within seven years. Then the population fluctuated before sharply declining starting in 2008.
Researchers put this data together with genetic information and other characteristics about the wolves.
“Biologists and people who study wild populations in animals have been noticing over the last decade or so [of studies] that when you change the environment around a species — climate change, introduction of new species, disease epidemics, etc. — you don’t just change the size of the population, the number of individuals living there, you often change the characteristics of the animals,” Coulson said.
“It’s a fairly general phenomenon, but they haven’t had an ability to understand how and why it’s occurred.”
The researchers used statistics to determine whether years were “good” and “bad” in terms of the wolves’ survival, growth and fertility rates. These were driven by environmental changes, including food availability, competition, disease and weather, Coulson said.
They used these survival rates to understand how these environmental conditions impact the various characteristics of the wolves. The researchers say they learned several big things, including that the population did worse when bad years came in series than when bad years were interspersed with good years.
“One bad year, yes, it has a short-term impact, but if you end up with a long string of harsh conditions, it’s worse for the population in the long run,” Coulson said. “We haven’t got enough data to work out exactly what it is that makes one good year or bad year,” he added, although availability of food and prominence of disease play roles.
The researchers also found that these changes can have varying, and even contradictory, effects on the life cycle of the wolves, or other animals being studied. “Survival, reproduction and individual growth are three key characteristics of a population, and they can all respond very differently to environmental change,” study researcher Daniel MacNulty, of Utah State University, told LiveScience. “Depending on how they respond to change, it will influence the dynamics of the population.”
“Environmental change doesn’t affect simply the ecology or the evolution of the population, it affects both of them simultaneously,” MacNulty said. “Both ecological and evolutionary changes can happen rapidly and in a population that’s subject to environmental change.”
For example, researchers could model rodents and other pests over time to determine how they might react to replacing a city green space with a parking lot. “You can’t just assume that environmental change is going to lead a decrease in a population; they can increase as well,” MacNulty said. “They may respond to a particular environmental change by leading to an overabundance of a particular pestspecies.”
