No doubt you are aware the mountains move but to appreciate their wanderings you need to zoom out to a geological time scale, that is unless you have a Continuous GPS Station at your disposal.
There are dozens of continuous GPS stations throughout the Yellowstone region that have been monitoring changes of the ground surface in Yellowstone for decades. How accurate are these device you ask? Well, they are so good they can detect movement of just a few millimeters in magnitude (just a fraction of an inch).
“They show us that the ground in Yellowstone is always changing, sometimes going up and sometimes going down, typically at a rate of about an inch (about 2-3 centimeters) per year. Since 2015, the caldera has been going down by about an inch or so per year. Prior to that, for a few years the ground was going up. For a few years before that, the ground was going down. It’s almost like Yellowstone is breathing.”
There are more than 1,000 Continuous Global Positioning System Stations operating in Western North America continuously measuring (generally collecting position information every 15 seconds) the three-dimensional position of a point on, or more specifically, near the earth’s surface. These daily positions are then concatenated to produce a daily time series, which allows tracking the 3D position of the station. Amazing!
