The earthquake caused up to ~18-20 feet of offset on the surface (fault scarps) that can still be seen today on both the Hebgen Lake and Red Canyon faults and, to a lesser extent, the Madison fault. Luckily, the dam did not fail and the waves eventually died off.
The waves were so large that they breached the Hebgen Lake dam a few times, leading panicked tourists to think the dam had failed. In addition, the sudden northward tilting of the basin caused Hebgen Lake to slosh back and forth. The combination of the landslide, fault scarps, and damaged highways trapped many tourists in the canyon that night. Rockslide damage to the Golden Gate area near Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, as a result of the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake. The landslide also dammed the Madison River, causing water to back up behind it creating EarthquakeLake. That landslide carried ~50 million cubic yards of rock, mud, and debris down the south side of the canyon and half way up the north side, partially burying the Rock Creek campground on the valley floor. The earthquake caused 28 fatalities, with most of those as a result of a large landslide that was triggered in the Madison Canyon. The official magnitude of the earthquake is 7.3, and it was located just outside the western boundary of Yellowstone National Park, ~6.5 miles WNW of West Yellowstone, Montana. However, we rarely focus on the threat of large earthquakes in the region, even though the hazard and risk from these types of events is much larger than a volcanic eruption because they happen so much more frequently.Īs we approach the 60th anniversary of the M7.3 Hebgen Lake earthquake, which occurred on August 17th, 1959 at 11:37 PM (MST), it seems appropriate to discuss the effects of the earthquake on the region, and what we might expect if a similar sized event happens in the near future.įirst, let's talk about the earthquake itself. We often hear about the potential for large volcanic eruptions of the Yellowstone volcano in the news and on television shows.
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