AI may have just found evidence of over 80,000 earthquakes that occurred underneath Yellowstone National park. The quakes, which are detailed in a new study, suggest that the supervolcano beneath the national park may be far more active than we previously thought.
Scientists have been using AI quite a bit to help push new boundaries in science as of late. We’ve seen AI create new cancer treatment plans, and now it looks like researchers are turning to the automated technology to help them track earthquakes and volcanic activity. However, the discovery of these 86,000 previously undetected earthquakes underneath Yellowstone is both frightening and intriguing, especially when you look at the fact that a few years ago scientists discovered that Yellowstone has more magma underneath it than they expected.
Discovering these quakes isn’t really a cause for panic, though. While it does suggest that the world beneath Yellowstone is more explosive than was previously expected, the new study, which is published in Science Advances, looked at 15 years of seismic data, so it isn’t like all of these quakes just happened this year or anything.
Looking back helps us look forward
This is one place where AI continues to help scientists excel. By looking back at data captured in the past, the scientists say they were able to detect and assign magnitudes to far more seismic readings than previously detected just by human eyes. And while the increase in seismic activity is cause for concern, it’s also cause for celebration. Other seismic advances in AI have allowed us to create an algorithm that can detect aftershocks following major earthquakes.
With these new data, scientists now know more about the Yellowstone Caldera than ever before. We finally have a better idea of just how active the area has been between 2008 and 2022. Further, the researchers found that more than half of the newly detected quakes were part of earthquake swarms, which are groups of small and interconnected quakes. These types of quakes happen within a relatively small area and only cause mostly small shifts in the world around them. The quakes were also detected across multiple immature fault lines, the researchers note.
This finding is also important because it shows that the quakes driving the world beneath Yellowstone aren’t happening across those more mature fault lines where researchers might have expected them to occur. This, combined with the rest of the data, paints a clearer picture of Yellowstone’s volcanic activity, and can hopefully be applied to other global findings to help create better, safer, and more reliable standards for global safety.
