BREAKING NEWS Earthquake rocks US city miles from supervolcano as fears of overdue eruption return
A small town in Idaho sitting near the Yellowstone supervolcano has been rocked by an early morning earthquake, possibly signaling a future eruption.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) reported that a 3.6 magnitude quake struck southeastern Idaho near the town of Soda Springs at 9:08am ET Friday morning.
The small rural town is just 126 miles from the Yellowstone's caldera, the bowl-shaped volcanic depression within the famous national park.
According to early data from USGS, the quake was located at a shallow depth of just over 10 miles beneath the surface.
Shallow earthquakes are felt more strongly than deeper ones as they are closer to the surface, but they rarely cause any damage to property or buildings.
While geologists are still investigating the Friday morning quake, the Yellowstone supervolcano influences seismic activity in this region due to its massive magma chamber and connected fault lines.
It generates 1,500 to 2,000 small earthquakes each year, most of which are weaker than 2.0 on the Richter scale of magnitude.
These tremors usually shake areas within the Yellowstone Caldera and nearby fault zones, but the supervolcano can also influence seismic activity over 100 miles away.
A new study recently showed that Yellowstone's magma chamber is just 2.3 miles or about 12,500 feet below Earth's surface.
Since it has not exploded in about 640,000 years, some experts and locals believe the volcano's next eruption is overdue.
An dramatic uptick in seismic activity is often a sign that a volcano may soon erupt.
Earthquakes around Yellowstone are driven by magma movement, hydrothermal activity, and regional tectonic stresses in the Intermountain Seismic Belt - an 800-mile an active fault region stretching through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.
Scientists from USGS discovered a newly opened volcanic vent in Norris Geyser Basin in 2024.
The vent is at the foot of a rhyloite lava flow, and is spewing hot steam up into the air.
Back in 2003, a similar vent was spotted just on the other side of the same rhyolite lava flow.
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