The REAL Threat at Yellowstone

Fears of the supervolcano lurking at the heart of Yellowstone National Park have long lingered in the backs of many Americans’ minds.

It’s been nearly 650,000 years since the last giant eruption, and predicting when the next will occur is a complex feat that continues to elude scientists.

Despite all the attention directed toward the supervolcano, experts monitoring activity at the park around the clock say it isn’t an eruption we should be immediately concerned about – it’s earthquakes.

The seismically active region produces up to 2,500 small earthquakes a year on average, and scientists say it’s only a matter of time before it’s rocked by a much larger magnitude 7 event. Super Volcano: The Tic... Breining, Greg Best Price: $1.77 Buy New $2.99 (as of 08:50 UTC - Details)

‘The biggest concern we have for Yellowstone is not with the volcano, it’s with the earthquakes,’ Michael Poland, scientist-in-charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, told USA Today.

‘This is an underappreciated hazard in the Yellowstone area. There can and there will be in the future magnitude-7 earthquakes.’

The chances of a major volcanic eruption at Yellowstone are currently considered to be quite low; based on knowledge of three explosive eruptions in the past 2.1 million years, at an interval of about 600,000 to 800,000 years, scientists estimate the yearly probability of another major event to be about 1 in 730,000.

Smaller lava flows have sprung up in the time between, with the last occurring about 70,000 years ago,USGS explains.

Large earthquakes, on the other hand, are far more common.

A magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit the park just 59 years ago on August 17, 1959, spurring a landslide that resulted in 28 deaths.

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