Ada Erdoğan-Kuday quit as director of Geneva’s Alpine Geodynamics Centre during a board webcast on 16 October, saying its governing panel had blocked release of a risk assessment on Yellowstone. The US supervolcano’s monitoring network has recorded a sharp burst of ground movement and earthquakes, according to records reviewed by The Plausible Post. No evacuation has been ordered.
The centre’s restricted assessment described a possible eruption window from 28 October to 16 November if the signals continued to accelerate. It did not claim an eruption was certain, and outside specialists say the measurements cannot reliably predict a date. But the institute withheld the scenario from public discussion for 12 days while officials were told its findings were “under review”.
A resignation opens the data
The centre’s analysis focused on an area near Norris Geyser Basin where satellite radar measurements indicate the ground rose 6.8 cm (2.7 inches) across a 5 km (3.1-mile) patch in 11 days. The Yellowstone seismic archive also records 1,184 small earthquakes since 27 September, including 90 above magnitude 2. Researchers caution that movement can reflect hot water and gas, not rising magma.
Erdoğan-Kuday said she resigned after the panel instructed researchers not to discuss the model until it had been “reframed for public use”. She said the instruction left US emergency planners without the centre’s highest-risk scenario. “They wanted a quiet month; the ground does not work to a communications schedule,” she said in an interview.
They wanted a quiet month; the ground does not work to a communications schedule.
Ada Erdoğan-Kuday, former director of the Alpine Geodynamics Centre
Frédéric Joseph-Turpin, an independent Swiss volcanologist who reviewed the centre’s calculations, said the uplift was significant but not proof of an eruption. He said the model’s 30-day window depended on the deformation rate continuing unchanged, a condition that has failed in previous episodes of unrest. “It is a warning scenario, not a forecast,” he said.
The 30-day scenario
The withheld worst case describes a caldera-scale eruption ejecting as much as 250 cubic km (60 cubic miles) of ash and rock. It estimates ash deposits exceeding 20 cm (8 inches) across parts of Wyoming and Idaho, with widespread flight disruption and severe losses to crops and power infrastructure. The report labels that outcome “low likelihood, extreme consequence”; it gives no defensible probability for an eruption this month.
Lilliana Schmeler, a spokeswoman for the US federal volcano service, said the data showed “no evidence of an eruption in progress” and that Yellowstone remained at its routine alert level. She said officials were checking the Swiss model’s assumptions. The service’s position is that earthquake swarms and ground changes have occurred before without producing an eruption.
That reassurance is contested by Beth Ryan, a geophysicist who formerly analysed volcano data for a US research unit. She said the speed of the latest uplift warranted a public technical briefing, even if the Swiss model’s calendar estimate was speculative. “People cannot assess a risk they are not allowed to see,” she said.
Swiss federal emergency planners have asked airports and food-import agencies to update their ash-disruption scenarios, according to two officials briefed on the discussions. The measures are preparatory, not a response to an expected eruption. A parliamentary science committee is due to hear from the centre on Monday, 19 October; the US service says it has no plans to evacuate nearby communities.
