Geysers and hot springs are some of the most dynamic geologic features on the planet. They are always changing and sometimes that change happens in places where we can see and appreciate it. This has been the case on Geyser Hill, near Old Faithful, in Yellowstone National Park.

Legislation has been introduced in Congress to establish Chesapeake National Recreation Area, a sprawling National Park System unit that would, if created, tie together new and existing sites and trails, according to its sponsors.

The Yellowstone region was known for millennia by Indigenous people, who would frequent the area in search of game and other resources—they had been in the area for at least 11,000 years! Obsidian from the region was an especially prized commodity, and artifacts made from obsidian taken from Yellowstone’s numerous lava flows have been found as far east as the Ohio River Valley.

President Biden on Tuesday captured a poignant chapter of U.S. history when he designated the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, which protects three historic sites in Illinois and Mississippi that were central to Emmett Till’s racially motivated murder, the acquittal of his murderers, and the subsequent activism by his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, that helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.