In an article by Joel Achenbach, it talks about the yellowstone being a volcano. It all started on August 29, 1870, when a 30-year-old Army lieutenant named Gustavus Doane, took an exploratory expedition in the Yellowstone region in Wyoming.When he came across the summit of Mount Washburn above the Yellowstone River, he noticed that something was missing from a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. The weird thing he saw, was what he didn't see, which was mountains. For miles and miles, the only elevations were in the distance, and Doane said he saw "one vast crater of a now extinct volcano."
Yellowstone is a volcano, and not just any volcano. The oldest, most famous national park in the United States sits squarely atop one of the biggest volcanoes on Earth. Doane was wrong, however, in one crucial respect. Yellowstone's volcano is not extinct. To an unsettling degree, it is very much alive. This is probably because the Yellowstone volcano was a supervolcano which are quite deadly. The last three super-eruptions have been in Yellowstone itself. The most recent, 640,000 years ago, was a thousand times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, which killed 57 people in Washington. These are facts that I did not know. Some other questions is whether or not people in the Yellowstone are afraid that the volcanoe would erupt and kill them? The other question is how is the volcanoes alive but just a crater?
Chris Sharrett
I felt that you presented the article very well. It got me interested and made me want to read it myself. It was very factual and interesting.
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