Yellowstone News and Information

The melting roads of Yellowstone National Park  Perhaps you’ve heard the legend of the melting roads in Yellowstone National Park.  The rumor is based in truth but, as you might expect, badly misrepresented.  It has nothing to do with potential volcanic activity; rather, thermal ground and asphalt don’t play well together and pose a considerable challenge for road maintenance and engineering. Yellowstone  Caldera  Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. This week's contribution is from Michael Poland, geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and Scientist-in-Charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. No doubt you’ve heard the story—roads have melted in Yellowstone National Park, which is supposedly evidence that the region is “heating up” and that a volcanic eruption is imminent.  This story gained a lot of traction in 2014—that was the year of a magnitude-4.8 earthquake (the larg...

  Yellowstone tourists wash dogs in thermal area, illegally of course