Canyon Education

After stopping by a couple points on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone Amy and I headed over to the Canyon Visitor Education Center.

Enter the new Canyon Visitor Education Center and the world of Yellowstone's supervolcano-an idea that has captured the minds and imaginations of people around the world. For the first time, park visitors will see, hear, and learn how the Yellowstone volcano, its geysers and hot springs, and geologic history shape the distribution and abundance of all life found here. Explore these ideas through interactive exhibits, animations, audio-visual productions, and real-time scientific data.--from NPS website

This visitor center is a beautiful building, and also not that old.  Below you can see one of the older visitor centers that this one replaced.

If you didn't understand it before, this is the place where you realize that you're inside a volcano.  Much of the park exists within a supervolcano caldera that has exploded in the past and may very well erupt again.  I think that this just means that you'd better see it all before it blows.  Don't bother staying away out of fear, you probably live in the path of the ash-cloud.

Why Is It Difficult to See?
The Yellowstone volcano is hard to see from the ground because it is so big.The enormous 30- by 45-mile caldera covers about a quarter of the park.  Subsequent lava flows and erosion have partially filled the caldera, also making it difficult to recognize.
--from visitor center exhibit sign

I found this section interesting because the Museum Center in Cincinnati (one of the two museums that I work at) recently featured the A Day in Pompeii exhibit which featured quite a bit of content about volcanoes around the world.

These boxes represent the amount of ash from various past eruptions.  Let's just say that Mount St. Helens is quite tiny compared to these.

Have you ever seen the Ring of Fire located around the Pacific Ocean?


I just discovered tonight that this is a kugel ball.  Interestingly enough the National Park website links to Wikipedia to define this object:

A kugel ball is a sculpture consisting of a large granite ball supported by a very thin film of water. Water flows beneath a very heavy, perfectly spherical rock from a spherical concave base with exactly the same curvature. A kugel ball can weigh thousands of pounds, but because the thin film of water lubricates it, the ball spins.

This display showed you samples of the various rocks that are found in Yellowstone as a result of volcanic activity and below contained a drawer that pulled out with the answer as to what each sample actually consisted of.

I found a large topographical map useful for seeing where we had visited and what areas we had yet to see in the perspective of the whole park.

Text from above sign: Siliceous sinter (specimen at right) forms teh scalloped edges of hot springs and the light-colored, seemingly barren landscape of geyser basins.  A type of siliceous sinter, called geyserite, forms the massive geyser cones.

A series of exhibits also explained the various types of geothermal features that can be found in Yellowstone, providing a handy reference.

We spent part of our time listening to a ranger presentation.  The talk was held upstairs in a classroom--so we got to go behind a "staff only" door and I thought that was fun as I only normally get to do that at one of my two jobs.  The talk was good, but similar to other presentations in that a good bit of it explained how things used to be (feeding bears for example) and how much different they are today (for good reason).



All of the pictures above and a good many more (though I'm not sure how legible the signs are) are located in this folder: