The long Independence Day holiday weekend has been surprisingly tense, thanks in part to a series of earthquakes centered roughly in between Los Angeles and Las Vegas that have millions in the southwest corner of the country on edge.
Over 500 tremors have been recorded in the Mojave Desert by the U.S. Geological Survey over the past few days, including a rolling 7.1 magnitude quake that reportedly shook southern California and Nevada for up to forty seconds, delaying an NBA summer league game and creating countless viral videos on social media. That followed a 6.4 temblor on the 4th of July that initially heightened tensions.
It's exceedingly rare in the region for a major earthquake to be followed by an even stronger one just a few days later. In this case, Friday evening's earthquake was more than ten times the intensity of the Independence Day quake.
And yet a funny thing happened when word of the 7.1 shaker spread online Friday evening.
According to Google Trends, there was a spike in search interest related to another geologically active area: the Yellowstone caldera that's home to a dormant supervolcano.
If you're online much at all, you'll know that the specter of a catastrophic Yellowstone eruption is popular fodder for paranoia-driven tabloid click-bait. As if on cue, a tabloid story appeared with a headline questioning whether the California quake could trigger the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Although the article goes on to basically debunk its own provocative premise, it still fueled plenty of chatter on social media connecting the quakes to an imminent eruption.
California just had a major earthquake and is long due to have an even bigger earthquake which could trigger Yellowstone and obliterate all of North America and end the world
— asia (@mydreamglows) July 6, 2019
The reality is that there's next to no chance of a California quake triggering a Yellowstone eruption. Even the people at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory who watch the caldera closer than anyone have said that the earthquakes measured at Yellowstone itself are not even predictive of an imminent eruption.
The connection that I see in the online reaction to the earthquakes is between two interesting psychological effects: Apophenia, which is the human tendency to link unrelated things, and the Duning-Kruger effect that finds people who know the least about something often seem confident that they know better than everyone else.
Case in point, the folks online connecting a freaky series of earthquakes to the other freaky bit of geology they read about in their social feeds a few months back - "You know Yellowstone is going to blow and kill us all any day now, right?"
But the truth is the world and its geology are much more complicated and even the experts don't fully understand it all. So better to spend our energy on just making sure people stay safe amid the very real tremors happening right now.
