Alaska Quake Shakes Yellowstone Park, Too

Nov 4, 2002

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A big earthquake that cracked roads and closed an oil pipeline in rural Alaska has spawned shudders thousands of miles south in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, researchers said on Monday.

More than 200 small earthquakes have been detected throughout the park, the team at the University of Utah Seismograph Stations said.

They were all tiny -- ranging in magnitude from 0 to 2.5, the researchers said. A few were felt by rangers, they said in a statement.

This "confirms what we are beginning to see worldwide -- that earthquakes can be triggered by other earthquakes at great distances, more so than we had though before," Robert Smith, a University of Utah professor of geology and geophysics, said in a statement.

"While the data are preliminary, they suggest that the Yellowstone earthquakes may have been triggered by the passage of large seismic waves generated by the Alaskan earthquake almost 2,000 miles from the park," the university added in the statement.

"Scientists once believed that an earthquake at one location could not trigger earthquakes at distant sites. But that belief was shattered in 1992 when the magnitude 7.3 Landers earthquake in California's Mojave Desert triggered a swarm of quakes more than 800 miles away at Yellowstone, as well as other jolts near Mammoth Lakes, California and Yucca Mountain, Nevada."

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