Sooo...a 5.3 Earthquake (the biggest one of some 72 earthquakes occurring that day) on Saturday, in Soda Springs, Idaho...WTF?!

It took a little digging to discover the sublatent significance of this cryptic item in the news. Soda Springs, Idaho, of which I had never heard before, is, as it happens (as I found out when I Googled it), just across the border from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, and is situated directly (about six miles) over the Yellowstone Mega-Volcano Magma Lake which, we have all learned in just the last decade, underlies virtually all of western Wyoming and southern Idaho--and which, when it erupts, as it does every 700,000 years or so, will devastate most of the western North American continent; as it has done, in fact, repeatedly, in prehistoric times.  The reason that there are so many earthquakes is that, it seems, since last June, the Great Yellowstone Mega-Volcano Magma Lake has been a-quiver with a "swarm," that is to say a great number, of earthquakes--to date, nearly 3,000, and still counting.  Lots of little earthquakes--only, with Saturday's 5.3 on the Richter scale, not so little--indicate, at the very least, that there is some movement of all that magma underlying what is probably the biggest and most explosive volcano in the world. When finally it does blow, it will make the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 seem like a party favor.

These "swarms" of earthquakes come and go  every few years.  The last such "swarm" was in 2013, and the one before that nearly a decade before--and the real reason they're referred to as occurring in "swarms," like bees, is to emphasize their relative meaninglessness as individual events: Lest we panic.  Because, before The Big One, a lot of really major, high-visibility shit has to happen after the earthquakes start "swarming"--Like Old Faithful has to go dry, and other unscheduled geysers have to start spouting, and stuff like that.  It is important to realize that we'll have lots of time to get ready for it, and that we shouldn't even be thinking about it now.  And that's why the news story about the odd 5.3 earthquake in Soda Springs, Idaho didn't mention that Soda Springs, Idaho is right, dead center, in the middle of the Yellowstone Mega-Volcano.  The News People (if that's who they are) don't want us to worry.  Or panic. Or think about it too much.