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Yellowstone National Park

Monitoring Yellowstone National Park's Hot Spots From Space

A lot of heat is released from Earth's surface at Yellowstone. The evidence of this heat flow includes thermal features like hot springs, geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles. Tracking the temperatures and sizes of thermal areas is critical for monitoring Yellowstone's hydrothermal activity, and also for understanding and preserving these spectacular features. But how do scientists accomplish this task, given that there are more than 10,000 individual thermal features spread out over a large and mostly inaccessible area within Yellowstone National Park?

UPDATED: Fly A Drone In A National Park, Be Barred For Life From That Park

Yellowstone National Park staff never was able to recover a drone that crashed into Grand Prismatic Spring back in 2014. And Yosemite National Park investigators were unable last year to find a drone pilot whose aircraft forced a park helicopter to land out of safety concerns. What if those who illegally fly their drones in parks are banned from the parks for life?

Deep Into Yellowstone: A Year’s Immersion In Grandeur & Controversy

In these dark times (and I don’t mean short winter solstice days), the holidays upon us, I thought some light reading would be good since practically all my reading these days is about our national decline on one front or another. A book about Yellowstone would be the ticket, and recently one had arrived by an author I didn’t know named Rick Lamplugh. I picked it up on Christmas Eve and dove in, looking forward to a respite and to some degree I got it, though I should have read the subtitle more carefully – “A Year’s Immersion in Grandeur and Controversy. This little book is a primer in both qualities of this iconic park.

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