All posts tagged Yellowstone Institute

My first mission in recent years has been to create a guidebook to Yellowstone that will stimulate others to visit and stay longer, helping them see, enjoy, and begin to understand all the amazing treasures the park has to offer. But exploring Yellowstone science is my second mission.

We can only become interested in subjects or activities after something or someone stimulates our curiosity. Think of your own elementary and middle school teachers or family members who have taken you out fishing or on long walks in the countryside, where they pointed things out to you. Several such teachers stimulated my curiosity and then encouraged me and helped me look further into aspects of the natural world. I remember particularly a teacher who was also a family friend. She introduced me to the variety of trees in our town by picking up leaves with me and teaching me their names and then pressing them. One year around the second week of August, she also taught me about the Perseid meteor shower, which fell so brilliantly in our clear Montana skies.

Many years later—concentrating often on the geology of Yellowstone—I’ve taken numerous summer courses offered by the Yellowstone Institute. I highly recommend those courses (http://issuu.com/yellowstoneya/docs/ya_summer_2013_catalog). I also audited a couple of Brown University geology classes, listened to and picked the brains of geologists, and most recently took in some sessions of the 2012 annual conference of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. 

Resources

A readily available source of recent Yellowstone scientific information is the journal Yellowstone Science, now available online (http://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/yellsciweb.htm).

Any of the above are good ways to begin to understand some of the basics of Yellowstone’s science. And the new fourth edition of Yellowstone Treasures is a good source too, because we have brought the scientific information as up to date with recent research as we can make it without technical language.

Three books I’d like to recommend that deal in different ways with Yellowstone geology are Roadside Geology of Yellowstone Country by William J. Fritz and Robert C. Thomas, Geology Underfoot in Yellowstone Country by Marc S. Hendrix, and Windows into the Earth by Robert B. Smith and Lee J. Siegel.

I’m planning to blog this fall about two other geological subjects: Why geology is not taught in our high schools nearly as often as are chemistry, physics, and biology, and the very big subject of what mankind is doing to our earth.