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Show 5 ••.,„ \ , ■,. ..... ... - =- \ , ...., ..., ....., S... ...... ....., ... •••■ disaster? Before you start crying "2012!" or consulting a van-dwelling Woody Harrelson on the hillside, you should know that while experts don't dismiss it entirely, they do say the majority of the alarmism is just irrational speculation. "The Wasatch Fault is in no way connected to Yellowstone whatsoever. The quakes that the people of Lehi felt are produced from localized faults and happen very often; we just don't feel them the majority of the time," says Milligan. "As far as the frequency of occurrence, [earthquakes] happen randomly; they haven't been increasing or decreasing. They have no trend." As for the big expected eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera, Heasler reassures us that we shouldn't be expecting it at all. "There are no concrete predictors or change of behavior recently as far as the caldera is concerned," replies Heasler. "So there's no need for alarm. At the same time we shouldn't rule an eruption out. What we study is what happens down a hundred miles beneath the Earth's surface. The farther away something is, the harder it is to sense it or see it. We're pushing very advanced technologies to the limits, and as those instruments -. ._ _ N improve, the view improves and then thereX no doubt there'll be modifications to theories or hypotheses — science is always a progress report." We now know that the small quakes are very common, that we are in no way connected to Yellowstone and that Yellowstone itself is the same as it always has been. But what about the "big one" that people have been claiming should happen any day now, which some have theorized could be at an 8.0 level? "For the SLC segment," replies Milligan, "there's been a major earthquake every 1200 to 1300 years. On a geologic time scale, the next big earthquake could be as soon as a hundred years, maybe a little more. For the Provo segment, there's a much longer interval, and they occur less frequently. Plus, the last one occurred less than a thousand years ago, so Utah County shouldn't be expecting any major events within the near future. In the meanwhile, the usual small quakes will continue occurring as they always have." After all of this, it looks like we won't be seeing the Hollywood-sized natural catastrophe that we were all expecting. However, experts say that they are not impossible; they just have a very miniscule chance of happening anytime soon. We don't have to return our 72-hour kits, nor keep them bedside. We can go back to worrying about the day-to-day and occasionally entertain our favorite imaginary (and in this case more plausible) zombie apocalypse scenarios. Business as usual. .. |