Yellowstone National Park was established on March 1, 1872, as the first national park in the world. The overwhelming and unique beauty found in this natural wonder is truly difficult to describe.
This Topic In Depth begin with the excellent National Park Service's (1) official Yellowstone Web Site, which contains the park's history, virtual field trips, park information, visitor guides, web cams, kids pages, and more. The next site offered by EarthTalk Studios is called Yellowstone Geographic. This extensive and graphically reliant site contains superb interactive activities related to the park and comes close to its goal of being "the best Yellowstone Web Site on the planet." The third site from UnMuseum.org called Weird Geology: Geysers explores the workings of Yellowstone's famous geysers with descriptions, photographs, illustrations, and a movie of an eruption. The next site from Exploratorium is a learning activity called Geyser: Cyclic Hot Water Fountain. With the help of their teacher, students build a working model of a geyser from common chemical equipment. From the University of Michigan, Meg Streepey's Geysers and the Earth's Plumbing Systems Web Site describes (for more advanced students) how geysers work, including how to analyze their thermal and hydrologic regimes. Another research site, from the University of Utah's College of Mines and Earth Sciences, is the GPS Surveys of the Yellowstone Hotspot and the Wasatch Fault, Utah. Objectives of the study are "to measure and understand the spatial and temporal variations of the crustal deformation produced by the interaction between lithospheric plate motion and the asthenospheric hotspot." The last two sites are from the USGS, the first of which is the Yellowstone River Basin National Water-Quality Assessment Program site. It contains a project description, available data, and other relevant information. The last site, Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, is a facility that is designed for observing volcanic and earthquake activity in the park. This site also contains a project description, volcanic data, maps, descriptions of volcanic rock, a frequently asked questions link, and more.