Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park is a national park in the United States. It is in northwest Wyoming, southern Montana, and eastern Idaho. It was set up by the U.S. Congress in 1872, and it is often thought to be the oldest national park in the world. It is 3,472 square miles (8,987 sq km) in size.

There are the Gallatin, Absaroka, and Teton mountain ranges all around it. Yellowstone has about 10,000 hydrothermal features, such as hot springs, steam vents, fumaroles, and geysers. It also has strange geological features, like fossil forests and broken flows of basaltic lava.

Yellowstone National Park Facts and History

Information about Yellowstone National Park: Old Faithful, which is the most well-known geyser in the park, erupts every 60 to 110 minutes, on average every 90 minutes. Some of the lakes and rivers in the park are Yellowstone Lake, Shoshone Lake, the Snake River, and the Yellowstone River.

Large parts of the park were destroyed by forest fires in 1988, but the trees have since grown back. In 1976, UNESCO named Yellowstone a biosphere reserve, and in 1978, it named Yellowstone a World Heritage Site.

Where is Yellowstone Park

Yellowstone National Park is the oldest, biggest, and maybe most well-known national park in the United States. It is mostly in northwest Wyoming, but parts of it are also in southern Montana and eastern Idaho. It has the most hydrothermal features of any place on Earth.

On March 1, 1872, the United States Congress made the park the first national park in the country. People also think that it was the first national park in the world. But some naturalists and many other people say that the formation of Mongolia’s Bogd Khan Mountain National Park, which might have happened in 1778, shows that Yellowstone was built on something that was there before.

Yellowstone Facts and History

Area of Yellowstone National Park: Yellowstone Park is in the shape of a square, but its eastern edge is not straight. It is 63 miles (101 km) long and 54 miles (87 km) wide at its widest point, and it covers 3,472 square miles (8,992 square km). Yellowstone is connected to Grand Teton National Park to the south by the 80-mile-long John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway, which opened in 1972.

Yellowstone is also surrounded by national forests, including the Gallatin (northwest and north), Custer (northeast), Shoshone (northeast and east), Bridger-Teton (southeast and south), and Caribou-Targhee (southwest and south) (southwest). The headquarters are at Mammoth Hot Springs, which is at the northern entrance to the park.

Supervolcano Yellowstone Park

Yellowstone is in a place where there have been a lot of earthquakes and volcanoes for tens of millions of years. The movement of the North American Plate has caused the Earth’s crust to thin in the area, creating a hot zone (a place where a dome of magma, or molten rock, comes close to the surface).

About 2.1 million years ago, a subterranean magma dome that had been building up in the Yellowstone area exploded in one of the world’s most destructive volcanic eruptions. Approximately 600 cubic miles (2,500 cubic kilometers) of rock and ash were thrown out, which is about 6,000 times as much as Mount Saint Helens threw out when it erupted in 1980.

Observations made at the start of the twenty-first century show that this single eruption was made up of two separate eruptions that happened about 6,000 years apart one very large and one much smaller. Around 1,300,000 and 640,000 years ago, there were two more large eruptions.

Yellowstone Facts

The last one, which was mostly lava flows, gave off about one-fifth as much material as the first. Each time the volcano erupted, the magma dome fell as its contents were let out. This made what is called a caldera, which is a big hole in the ground.

The Yellowstone Caldera is a roughly oval-shaped basin that is in the west-central part of the national park and includes the northern two-thirds of Yellowstone Lake. It is 50 km by 70 km in size and is the result of the third eruption. Two new magma domes have grown in the caldera.

One is just west of Yellowstone Lake and the other is north of Yellowstone Lake. Many of the park’s most famous hydrothermal features come from the western dome. The Yellowstone area is also very active in terms of earthquakes. The volcanic history of the area created a network of faults on the park’s surface. There are a lot of small earthquakes in the area every year.

Most of these tremors have a magnitude of 2.0 or less and are not felt by locals. However, every so often, a stronger quake will hit the area and affect the park. In 1959, a huge earthquake hit southern Montana, just outside the park’s northern corner. This shook up a number of hydrothermal features in Yellowstone, including Old Faithful, the most famous geyser in the park.

Yellowstone National Park Location

Yellowstone’s landscape is the result of tectonic activity (earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) and ice and water erosion. Most of the park is made up of large volcanic plateaus that are an average of 7,875 feet high (2,400 meters). There are three mountain ranges that go into the park. They are the Gallatin Range in the northwest; the Absaroka Range in the east; and the northern tip of the Teton Range at the park’s southern edge.

The Absarokas are the highest mountains in the park. Many of their peaks are higher than 10,000 feet (3,050 meters). Eagle Peak is the highest point in the range. It is 11,358 feet high and is on the southeast edge of the park (3,462 meters). In addition to its rocky mountains, it also has beautiful deep valleys carved by glaciers. The park has rare natural features like fossil forests, eroded basaltic lava flows, a black obsidian (volcanic glass) mountain, and strange erosional shapes.

Yellowstone Lake

Yellowstone is also known for its many beautiful lakes and rivers. Yellowstone Lake is the largest body of water in the park. It has a surface area of 132 square miles (342 square kilometers) and is 7,730 feet above sea level. It is the highest mountain lake of its size in North America (2,356 meters). About 150,000 years ago, a small eruption in the caldera created the West Thumb area, which is a knob-like extension of the lake on its west side. Shoshone Lake is the next largest lake after Yellowstone Lake. It is in the caldera, southwest of Yellowstone Lake.

Yellowstone History

The Yellowstone River is the most important way water gets out of the park. It comes in at the southeast corner, flows north (including through Yellowstone Lake), and flows out near the northwest corner. In the north-central part of Yellowstone Park, there are two beautiful waterfalls the Upper Falls, which drops 114 feet (35 meters), and the Lower Falls, which drops 308 meters (98 feet) (94 meters).

The falls are at the western end of the beautiful Grand Canyon in Yellowstone. The river has cut a gorge there that is 19 miles (30 km) long, 240 to 370 meters deep, and as wide as 4,000 feet (1,200 m). The canyon has red, pink, yellow, buff, lavender, and white walls. They are made of rhyolite, which is a type of volcanic rock that has been broken down.

Another important stream is the Snake River, which starts at the park’s southern edge and flows through the park until it meets the Lewis River and flows south. And the Gallatin and Madison rivers, which start in the northwestern part of Yellowstone and flow through the park before joining with the Jefferson River to form the Missouri River in southern Montana.

Yellowstone Attractions

Yellowstone’s main attractions are its 10,000 hydrothermal features, which make up about half of all those known in the world. Because the crust of the area is broken up in many places, groundwater can seep down to where it meets magma. Through steam vents, fumaroles, colorful hot pools, mud cauldrons, paint pots, hot springs, terraces, hot rivers, and geysers, water that is very hot and full of minerals comes back to the surface.

People think that the area’s constant small tremors keep the many cracks and fissures in the ground open. If they closed, minerals would settle out of the hot water as it cooled and block the cracks. Many of the park’s more than 300 geysers reach 100 feet (30 meters) or higher when they erupt. This is more than half of the world’s total. Old Faithful is the most well-known geyser in Yellowstone. It erupts every 90 minutes, but each time it does so, it looks different. It is in the middle of the west side of the park.

Famous Geysers in Yellowstone

Some of Yellowstone’s most famous geysers and other thermal features are in the western part of the park. 50 miles (80 km) north of Old Faithful is a place called Mammoth Hot Springs. Most of them can be found in the Upper Geyser, Midway Geyser, and Lower Geyser basins, which are about 10 miles (16 km) north of Old Faithful. One of them is the Giantess Geyser at Old Faithful. It only erupts every two to six months.

The deep blue Morning Glory Pool in the Upper Geyser Basin and the Excelsior Geyser in the Midway Geyser Basin, which doesn’t erupt very often but spews hundreds of gallons of hot water every minute when it does. In the Lower Geyser Basin, the Fountain Paint Pots have pink, plopping mud geysers, fumaroles, and a blue hot spring lake.

About half way between the southern hydrothermal area and Mammoth Hot Springs is the Norris Geyser Basin. It is famous for having some of the world’s hottest and most acidic hydrothermal features. as well as Steamboat Geyser. It is the highest geyser in the world and can shoot water up to 300 feet in the air (90 meters).

Hundreds of hot springs have left behind travertine, which is made of calcium carbonate, on the side of a mountain near Mammoth Hot Springs. The Angel Terrace and the colorful Minerva Terrace are both well-known rock formations. They are made of white granite that has been stained in many places by living things.

Yellowstone Climate

Yellowstone has a cold, temperate climate that makes it feel like it is on a continent. The high average elevation, relatively high latitude, deep location on the continent, and hilly terrain all have an effect on the park. The rest of Yellowstone is wetter in the summer and drier in the winter, but the north-central part of the park is the opposite.

Almost always, temperatures drop as you go up in altitude. Because Yellowstone is so big and has so many different kinds of land, the weather in different parts of the park can change drastically at any time. Also, in a short amount of time, things can change a lot in one place.

Summer days are hot and sunny. In July, daytime temperatures at lower elevations reach around 80°F (27°C) and drop to around 40°F or 50°F (about 10°C) at night. Temperatures are usually cooler in the mountains. Even though it doesn’t rain as much in the summer, there are often thunderstorms in the afternoon.

During the winter, temperatures rarely go above the mid-20s (about 4°C), and they often drop to 0°F (about 18°C) or lower at night. Depending on altitude and location, the amount of rain that falls each year ranges from about 10 inches (250 mm) in the north to about 80 inches (2,000 mm) on the western slopes of the northern Teton foothills. Snow is common in most places, especially at higher elevations. It usually starts in the early fall and lasts until April or May.

Plant and animal life……