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Yellowstone Park is the largest and most famous megafauna location in the contiguous United States. Grizzly bears, cougars, wolves, and free-ranging herds of bison and elk live in this park. The Yellowstone Park bison herd is the oldest and largest public bison herd in the United States.
There are at least 70 named mountain peaks over 8,000 feet (2,400 m) in Yellowstone in four mountain ranges. Two of the ranges—The Washburn Range and the Red Mountains—are minor and completely enclosed within park boundaries.
Within Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres, visitors have unparalleled opportunities to observe wildlife in an intact ecosystem, explore geothermal areas that contain about half the world’s active geysers, and view geologic wonders like the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.
- PO Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, 82190-0168, WY
- Overview
- Geology
Yellowstone National Park, the oldest, one of the largest, and probably the best-known national park in the United States. It is situated principally in northwestern Wyoming and partly in southern Montana and eastern Idaho and includes the greatest concentration of hydrothermal features in the world. The park was established by the U.S. Congress on...
Yellowstone is situated in a region that has been volcanically and seismically active for tens of millions of years. Tectonic movement of the North American Plate has thinned Earth’s crust in the area, forming a hot spot (a place where a dome of magma, or molten rock, comes close to the surface). About 2.1 million years ago a subsurface magma dome that had been building up in the Yellowstone area blew up in one of the world’s most cataclysmic volcanic eruptions. Some 600 cubic miles (2,500 cubic km) of rock and ash were ejected, equivalent to about 6,000 times the amount of volcanic material that was released during the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980. (Observations made in the early 21st century indicated that this single eruption actually consisted of two events about 6,000 years apart: one very large and a second much smaller one. Subsequent massive eruptions occurred about 1,300,000 and 640,000 years ago—the last event (consisting in large part of lava flows) producing about two-fifths as much material as the first one.
Each of those eruptions caused the magma dome that had built up to collapse as its contents were released, leaving an enormous caldera. The present-day Yellowstone Caldera, the product of the third eruption, is a roughly oval-shaped basin some 30 by 45 miles (50 by 70 km) that occupies the west-central portion of the national park and includes the northern two-thirds of Yellowstone Lake. Two resurgent magma domes—one just north of and the other just west of Yellowstone Lake—have been forming in the caldera, and the western dome underlie many of the park’s best-known hydrothermal features.
The Yellowstone region is also extremely active seismically. A network of faults associated with the region’s volcanic history underlies the park’s surface, and the region experiences hundreds of small earthquakes each year. The great majority of those quakes are of magnitude 2.0 or less and are not felt by people in the area, but occasionally a more powerful temblor will strike in the region and have effects in the park. One such event, a deadly quake that struck in 1959 in southern Montana just outside the northwestern corner of the park, affected a number of hydrothermal features in Yellowstone, including its iconic geyser, Old Faithful.
Britannica Quiz
Yellowstone National Park is the wild, free-flowing, beating heart of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Its real showstoppers are the geysers and hot springs – nature’s crowd-pleasers – but at every turn this land of fire and brimstone breathes, belches and bubbles like a giant kettle on the boil.
One of the most geologically dynamic areas on Earth due to a shallow source of magma and resulting volcanic activity. One of the largest volcanic eruptions known to have occurred in the world, creating one of the largest known calderas.
Apr 11, 2024 · Yellowstone was set aside as the world’s first national park in 1872, and it remains among the most beloved national parks in the world! Yellowstone has everything: wildlife, mountains, meadows, canyons, waterfalls, and the largest high-elevation lake in America.
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