The recent swarm of small earthquakes at Mount Rainier has not only made national headlines but also history: Researchers have never recorded seismic activity like this before at the active stratovolcano.
“It’s now a larger swarm than anything we’ve seen since we’ve been (seismic) monitoring anything at Mount Rainier,” Alex Iezzi, a research geophysicist, said in an interview Thursday.
Researchers started seismic monitoring at Mount Rainier in the 1970s, according to Iezzi, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory and said she conferred with other seismologists to identify the origin of observations at the mountain. Prior to then, it’s unknown whether the volcano had experienced a larger swarm — a term defined as a cluster of earthquakes occurring in rapid succession in the same area…