Castle Geyser, Yellowstone. Geysers in Yellowstone Park in the USA

He spent 3 years here, wandering in surrealistic landscapes in the middle of mountains and geysers. Colter's journey to Yellowstone is one of the most famous in the history of the Wild West research. When he told about his discovery of the world of geysers, no one believed him. In the 1860s, prospectors appeared in Yellowstone in search of gold. Gold was not found here, but thanks to the miners and hunters stories about hot springs, geysers, and other wonders of nature spread, causing great interest in Yellowstone.

October 26, 1976 Yellowstone National Park received the status of the International Biosphere Reserve, and on September 8, 1978 was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Geyser Hill is about 40 geysers, raging pools of unreal colors, photogenic puffing cones and snarling fumarole. The hill is located right in the center of the national park Yellowstone. There are also five of the largest geysers: Castle Geyser, Old Faithful, Grand Geyser, Daisy, and Riverside.

One of the most recent major eruptions occurred 74 thousand years ago on the Toba volcano, located in Indonesia in the so-called subduction zone, where the oceanic crust sinks under the lithosphere plate. There is an assumption that as a result of this disaster, the population of the ancestors of modern people has dramatically decreased. With the explosion in the 1st century n e. Another Indonesian volcano - Krakatau - today is associated with the sharpest cooling in the last 2 thousand years.

And just 200 years ago, the most powerful eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora occurred, as a result of which the average global temperature dropped by about 1 degree. This "year without summer" with a series of summer frosts caused massive crop failures in vast territories of the Northern Hemisphere, including the USA, Canada and Northern Europe, which led to hunger and disease. This phenomenon was called "volcanic winter" by analogy with the "nuclear" one: it was caused by huge amounts of erupted volcanic dust and gases that entered the stratosphere, where they circulated for several years, scattering and reflecting solar radiation, which led to a prolonged cooling period.

The shape of the cone is constantly changing due to additional layers of mineral deposits during eruptions. Yellowstone's human history is about 11,000 years old. But on the territory of the caldera, Native American tribes rarely penetrated because of the frequent and loud sounds, sometimes reminiscent of a thunderclap. The Indians were convinced that the spirits living in this territory did not like the invasion of man into their world.

The geysers of Yellowstone National Park make up two thirds of all existing geysers on Earth. Even when the rest of North America was a wilderness region, with wandering bison, moose, bears, pristine beauty of wildlife and lots of wildlife, the Yellowstone area was unique. Geysers, hot springs and fumaroles in the park are formed where rainwater and melting snow penetrate deep into the Earth, heat up from the so-called "Yellowstone hot spot", and then break through to the surface.

Being close to the surface, geysers periodically erupt under high pressure hot water and steam streams, some reaching 120 m. About 10,000 thermal springs are evidence of the enormous amount of heat released from molten magma resting inside the Earth's crust. Yellowstone National Park has become the best place in North America - and perhaps all over the world - to observe wild wolves.

For wildlife lovers, they are a more popular attraction than geysers. In the morning and in the evening groups of nature lovers, biologists, photographers have the opportunity to observe how a pack of wolves pursues, attacks and kills moose, bighorn sheep and even bison. Wolves can be seen throughout the year, but best of all in the winter, or in the early spring.

Scientists know super-eruptions in which explosive emissions reach at least 1 thousand km3 in solid equivalent. In total, about 20 such supervolcanoes are known on Earth, and over the past million years, it has been firmly established that three of them have erupted: the Indonesian Toba, Yellowstone in the northwestern United States and Taupo in New Zealand. There is reason to believe that such large eruptions could have occurred in other sparsely populated areas, such as Kamchatka, but their evidence has not been preserved or has not yet been found. However, as we see, eruptions of a smaller scale also have global effects: for example, emissions from the Tambor eruption in 1815 amounted to "only" 180 km3 of ash and volcanic material (tephra).

Therefore, in a practical sense, all volcanoes that can throw such a large amount of erupted products into the upper atmosphere are extremely important to us that, taking into account the peculiarities of atmospheric circulation, they can cause pronounced and long-term climate changes. Until recently, it was believed that such events are rare enough - on average once every millennium, this inspired some optimism, given the duration of human life. But the results of recent studies in the ice of Greenland and Antarctica give us other shocking figures.

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