"Supervolcano" Concerns Rise After Montana Hit By Strongest Earthquake In 20 Years

Following a swarm of over 1100 earthquakes recorded in the Yellowstone caldera over the past month, prompting scientists to voice concerns about a dormant Yellowstone "Supervolcano" slowly waking up, overnight these concerns escalated after a strong M5.8 earthquake hit western Montana early on Thursday morning - the strongest quake to hit the area in the past 20 years - the U.S. Geological Survey reported, with Reuters adding that the tremor was felt hundreds of miles away, from Missoula to Billings and some surrounding states. 

The quake appears to be the largest to hit Montana since a slightly weaker M5.6 struck outside of Dillon a dozen years ago. By comparison, the state"s largest quake which struck the West Yellowstone region 58-years ago was 7.2 magnitude.

The quake"s epicenter was about 6 miles south of Lincoln, originating from a depth of nearly 3 miles underground, according to a preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Service.

Subsequently the USGS recorded seven more tremors in the same area within an hour of the initial quake, which ranged in magnitude from 4.9 to 3.8.

The quake which struck at 12:30 a.m. local time was strong enough to knock items off of walls and shelves in Helena and Missoula.  Some Twitter users posted feeling tremors as far as Spokane, Wash., Boise, Idaho and Calgary, Canada.

Mike Stickney, seismologist at the Earthquake Studies Office, Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology on the Montana Tech campus in Butte, said the quake was probably the strongest in Montana since October 1964. The location, he said, is not surprising. “It’s right along the axis of the intermountain seismic belt.” He said the quake occurred on a strike/slip fault, a vertical fault where one side moves horizontally against the other, similar to the kind of movement experienced along the San Andreas Fault in California.

That said, he said he "does not believe" the quake is seismically tied to the recent “swarm” of smaller earthquakes in the Yellowstone National Park area. “I don’t see any direct relationship between these two sequences,” he said. “This is a pretty sizeable earthquake. It would certainly have the potential to do structural damage near the epicenter, but we’ve had no reports indicating damage yet.” Others, however, disagree.

Residents in Lincoln briefly lost power and there was a gas leak in Helena, the National Weather Service in Great Falls said on Twitter. Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton said Lincoln lost electricity as a result of the quake, but the power has since been restored.

Lisa Large, a bartender at the Wheel Inn Tavern in Lincoln, said the power went out and bottles flew off the shelves when the earthquake hit. Other than that, she said, there wasn’t any major damage there. She was in a fairly jovial mood when called by a Missoulian reporter near closing time at 1:50 a.m. “It slopped all the grease outta the fryer,” she said. “The kitchen’s a mess right now. The lights have been out and they just came back on. Hopefully we don’t get any more aftershocks.”

Quoted by the Missoulian, Dutton said the fire chief in Lincoln was sending people out to check for damage, but they have not found any yet.  Missoula Police Department Corporal Mick McCarthy said the department has had calls from people asking what was going on with the earthquake and some medical calls, but no power outages reported or gas leaks. "No property damage reported yet, but it"s still early," McCarthy said.

Ray Anderson, 76, told the Associated Press that it was the strongest quake he had ever felt.

Carolyn Kennedy, who lives in South Calgary, said she felt about 20 seconds “of waves” from the tremors. “We heard rumbling noises,” she messages FoxNews.com, adding that perfume bottles on her desk shook from the tremblor.

Twitter lit up around Montana seconds after the quake, with people weighing in from Bozeman to Kalispell to Glacier National Park to Billings and elsewhere in Montana.

"Did the entire state of Montana just have an earthquake?" tweeted Brandon Furr. Sean Ryan of Butte tweeted, "Now that everyone in Montana is awake from that earthquake ... you guys want to play Monopoly or something?" Glacier National Park account tweeted, "Western Montana just had a decent-sized earthquake. Good shake here at Park HQ in West Glacier #geology."

Musician John Mayer, a part-time Bozeman resident, took to Twitter to marvel at the event. "Wow," he wrote on Twitter. "Earthquake in Montana."

Wow. Earthquake in Montana. So if you wonder if you"re crazy and you"re searching the words earthquake and Montana, earthquake Montana.

— John Mayer (@JohnMayer) July 6, 2017

While minor earthquakes are fairly common, Thursday"s moderate quake was the strongest felt in western Montana in two decades. The last one to exceed 5.0 magnitude was reported 12 years ago near Dillon, according to the USGS. Most of those incidents had epicenters farther south, many centering in the famously active Yellowstone National Park. In total, there have been more than 70 quakes measuring larger than 4.5 in Montana and parts of Wyoming and Idaho since 1925, according to the USGS. The largest quake in state history was magnitude 7.2 in 1959 near west Yellowstone.

The USGS reports the Lincoln quake was one of 20 within the last week and 236 within the last month.

The Federal Government Owns 61% Of Idaho, 64% Of Utah, And 84% Of Nevada

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Did you know that the federal government owns 28 percent of all land in the United States? 

Today, the feds control approximately 640 million acres of land, and after decades of very poor management, many are calling on the states to take a larger role.  This is particularly true in the 11 western states where the federal government collectively owns 47 percent of all land.  East of the Mississippi River, the feds only own 4 percent of all land, and there is no reason for such a disparity to exist.  In Connecticut and Iowa, the federal government only owns 0.3 percent of all land.  Such an arrangement seems to work very well for those states, and so why can’t we dramatically reduce federal land ownership in the western states as well?

Of course the federal government will always need a very small amount of land for certain national purposes, and nobody is disputing that.  According to the Heritage Foundation, the following are the primary purposes that federal land is being used for…

These holdings include national parks, national forests, recreation areas, wildlife refuges, vast tracts of range and wasteland managed by the Bureau of Land Management, reservations held in trust for Native American tribes, military bases, and ordinary federal buildings and installations.

We will always need to have some land set aside for those purposes.

But does the Bureau Of Land Management really need more than 247 million acres?

Does the Forest Service really need more than 192 million acres?

Does the Fish and Wildlife Service really need more than 89 million acres?

If the feds were doing a good job, that would be one thing, but in so many instances federal land managers have gotten an extremely bad reputation.  The following comes from an article by Sue Lani Madsen…

For example, federal land is exempt from state noxious weed control laws, and lack of weed control has earned federal land a reputation as a bad neighbor. Frustrated local federal land managers are hindered by layers of internal regulations and restricted funding that make timely response to weed outbreaks difficult.

And thanks to mismanagement by the feds, wildfires tend to spread very rapidly in many areas owned and controlled by the federal government.  At this point more than 2.6 million acres of land have already burned in 2017, and that is close to 30 percent ahead of last year’s pace.

If you have never lived in a western state, it may be difficult for you to imagine just how frustrating it is to have the federal government in control of vast stretches of your state.  In so many cases the feds simply do not care about local issues or concerns, and when they drop the ball there is often very little that can be done about it.

According to Ballotpedia, the federal government owns more than 28 percent of the land in 12 different western states…

• Washington: 28.5 percent


• Montana: 29.0 percent


• New Mexico: 34.7 percent


• Colorado: 35.9 percent


• Arizona: 38.6 percent


• California: 45.8 percent


• Wyoming: 48.1 percent


• Oregon: 52.9 percent


• Alaska: 61.2 percent


• Idaho: 61.6 percent


• Utah: 64.9 percent


• Nevada: 84.9 percent

Here in Idaho, we are glad to have so much public land because it is a wonderful thing for hunters, fishers, hikers and those that enjoy other outdoor activities.

So we want to continue our tradition of having wide open spaces that are owned by the public – we just want the federal government to hand over the keys and leave.

We believe that Idaho land should be owned by the people of Idaho, and we believe that Idaho’s natural resources should be managed by the people of Idaho.

Those that are against transferring ownership of federal land to the states often argue that it would be too expensive for the states to handle…

Paying for wildfire protection alone—it accounts for about half of the U.S. Forest Service’s annual budget of $6.5 billion—would burden Western taxpayers, says the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group.

States would be forced to raise taxes or sell off iconic national properties to developers or other private investors in order to pay for everything the federal government does now—from complicated tasks like enforcing environmental regulations and maintaining cultural and historic resources to simple ones like putting up road and trail signs.

But one study found that it is actually profitable for states to manage their own public lands.  Here is more from Sue Lani Madsen…

A 2015 study by the Property and Environment Research Center, a free-market environmental think tank, consistently found state-managed land provided a return on every dollar spent while federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management cost more to operate than they return in revenue.

At the end of the day, this is just another area where we need to readjust the balance of power between the states and the federal government.  Our founders intended to create a system where the states had much more power than the central government, but instead that has become totally flipped around.

Today, it is almost as if the 10th Amendment does not even exist.  Most of the time the federal government treats state governments as little more than puppets, and very few state governments have the backbone to stand up for themselves.

As conservatives, we need to start standing up against the costly federal mandates that are imposing such a financial burden on our state governments.  We want control of our own laws and our own budgets.

It is also time for the feds to get off the backs of our farmers, our miners, our loggers and our ranchers.  Some of the most abusive federal agencies, such as the EPA, need to be shut down entirely. And if our local communities do not want to take Islamic refugees from the Middle East, they should not be forced to do so by the federal government.  Here in Idaho, three young Islamic refugees raped a 5-year-old girl, and yet the federal government does not seem to care about our outrage.

Recently, I have been talking to so many people that just want the federal government to leave us alone.  Instead of solving our problems, most of the time the federal government is the problem, and things would be so much better if the feds would just stay out of our business.