The Corps’s operations on the slide took a total of close to $1,700,000 of funds set up for such emergencies. As a result, the towns below the slide are safe from the flood threat the slide might represent.
LIVING GEOLOGY
Just how common are mass earth shakeups like the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake, anyhow?
Geologists tell us they’re frequent, with a dozen or more major quakes, and thousands of minor tremors happening each year.
Earthquakes are the natural outcome of the fact that the earth, while seeming substantial and changeless, is constantly, if most gradually, in the process of change. Mountains are thrust up. Glaciers carve them down. Volcanoes pour out their molten rock. Rivers and floods scour their erosive paths. Sediments slide and settle.
The enormous masses which great internal earth forces have raised up to mountain height, create counter stresses. These forces build up for years, sometimes for centuries or longer.
Eventually something has to give. When this happens on a grand, or spectacular scale, we call it an earthquake.
Stress, caused by the quake, resulting from slump of surficial material caused the attractive curving of this fence along Highway 287 east of Hebgen Dam.(U. S. Geological Survey)
Whether you’re a connoisseur, expert, or not, the spectacular 1959 Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake was a beaut. Geologists call it a “textbook earthquake,” because it included nearly all of the classic actions, or results which quakes are likely to cause.