# What is Yellowstone?

An episode of [History for Kids / History's Not Boring: The Kids History Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1852047160), 28 Sep 2026, 13 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2555342/episodes/19844129-what-is-yellowstone.mp3

Welcome to Yellowstone, where the ground steams, smells like rotten eggs, and shoots giant fountains of boiling water into the sky! But did you know this incredible place is actually sitting right on top of a sleeping giant? It’s true! Yellowstone was created in 1872 as the very first national park in the whole world, and it is located right above a massive supervolcano! Join Mira and Finn as they explore the wild, bubbling, and explosive history of this amazing natural wonderland. You'll learn all about Old Faithful, a famous geyser that erupts like clockwork, shooting thousands of gallons of boiling water seventeen stories high! Plus, discover the dramatic and magical true story of the gray wolves. Find out how bringing just 31 wolves back to the park in 1995 completely changed the landscape, saved the dying trees, and even brought the beavers back! From rainbow-colored hot springs filled with boiling bacteria to a 55-mile-long sponge of hot rock hidden underground, this episode is packed with mind-blowing facts. Get ready to explore the wild world of Yellowstone!

## Transcript

[0:45] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to History's Not Boring by Codopoly.com.
[0:49] SPEAKER_00: I'm Mira! And I'm Finn.
[0:51] SPEAKER_00: Before we jump in, a big hello to Byron, who is eight and a half in West Hartford, Connecticut.
[0:58] SPEAKER_00: Byron is a true nature lover who asked all about Yellowstone, so this one is for you.
[1:04] SPEAKER_01: We hope you get to visit soon.
[1:06] SPEAKER_01: And a huge hello to five and a half year old Eckie in London.
[1:10] SPEAKER_01: Eckie is fascinated by volcanoes and asked how ancient people stayed safe from them.
[1:16] SPEAKER_00: If you haven't already, tap follow wherever you're listening so you never miss an episode.
[1:21] SPEAKER_01: So, are we talking about nature or volcanoes today?
[1:26] SPEAKER_00: Both! Today we're exploring the wild, bubbling, erupting story of America's first national park, which sits right on top of a sleeping giant.
[1:36] SPEAKER_01: Wait, a real giant?
[1:38] SPEAKER_01: Like a monster?
[1:40] SPEAKER_00: A supervolcano! Imagine standing on ground that is steaming, smelling like rotten eggs, with pools of rainbow-coloured boiling mud and giant fountains of water shooting straight up into the sky.
[1:54] SPEAKER_00: Whoa, how high do they shoot?
[1:56] SPEAKER_00: Up to 184 feet! That is as tall as a 17-story building, blasting over 8,000 gallons of boiling hot water into the air in a single massive eruption.
[2:09] SPEAKER_01: Wait, 8,000 gallons?
[2:11] SPEAKER_01: That's enough to fill a large water truck.
[2:14] SPEAKER_01: Does it happen all the time?
[2:15] SPEAKER_00: It happens every single day, like clockwork.
[2:19] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Yellowstone National Park, where the earth is alive, wolves roam the valleys, and history is literally bubbling up from the ground.
[2:28] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so where exactly is this explosive park?
[2:31] SPEAKER_00: Yellowstone is massive.
[2:34] SPEAKER_00: It covers over 2.2 million acres.
[2:37] SPEAKER_00: That's larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
[2:41] SPEAKER_00: Whoa, that is a ton of space.
[2:44] SPEAKER_00: Where is it?
[2:45] SPEAKER_00: Most of it is in the state of Wyoming, in the United States.
[2:49] SPEAKER_00: But it also spills over into Montana and Idaho.
[2:53] SPEAKER_00: Native Americans have lived and hunted in that region for over 11,000 years.
[2:59] SPEAKER_01: Wait, Eckie wanted to know how ancient people stayed safe from the volcano.
[3:03] SPEAKER_01: Did it blow up on them?
[3:05] SPEAKER_00: That's a brilliant question, Eckie.
[3:07] SPEAKER_00: The good news is, the Yellowstone Supervolcano hasn't had a massive eruption in over 630,000 years.
[3:15] SPEAKER_00: So ancient people were perfectly safe from big explosions.
[3:20] SPEAKER_00: Phew, that's a relief.
[3:22] SPEAKER_00: In fact, they used obsidian, which is a sharp black volcanic glass found in the park, to make arrowheads and tools.
[3:30] SPEAKER_00: But in the 1800s, when European-American explorers first visited, they couldn't believe what they saw.
[3:37] SPEAKER_00: What did they see?
[3:39] SPEAKER_00: A mountain man named John Coulter visited in the winter of 1807.
[3:44] SPEAKER_00: When he came back east and described ground that was literally boiling, people thought he was making it up.
[3:50] SPEAKER_00: They jokingly called his stories a fiery underworld.
[3:54] SPEAKER_00: Haha, they thought he was just telling tall tales.
[3:58] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[3:59] SPEAKER_00: It wasn't until the late 1860s and 1870s that official expeditions went to check it out.
[4:06] SPEAKER_00: They brought back photographs and paintings.
[4:09] SPEAKER_00: When politicians in Washington DC saw the proof, they were stunned.
[4:13] SPEAKER_00: What did they do next?
[4:15] SPEAKER_00: On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S.
[4:20] SPEAKER_00: Grant signed a law making Yellowstone the very first national park in the whole world.
[4:26] SPEAKER_00: He set it aside so it could be protected forever.
[4:29] SPEAKER_01: So you said it sits on a supervolcano.
[4:32] SPEAKER_01: What exactly is a supervolcano?
[4:34] SPEAKER_01: Is it just a really big, tall mountain with smoke?
[4:38] SPEAKER_00: Nope, it's actually a giant depression in the ground called a caldera.
[4:42] SPEAKER_00: And underneath that caldera is a magma chamber that is mind-bogglingly huge.
[4:48] SPEAKER_01: How huge are we talking?
[4:50] SPEAKER_01: Like the size of a city?
[4:52] SPEAKER_00: Way bigger! The shallower magma chamber is a 55-mile-long sponge of hot, mostly solid rock with melted pockets.
[5:02] SPEAKER_00: It is just 3 to 10 miles right beneath the feet of the people walking in the park.
[5:08] SPEAKER_01: Wait, so when you walk in Yellowstone, there is a giant sponge of hot rock just three miles under your shoes.
[5:14] SPEAKER_00: Yes! And that intense heat is what causes all the incredible water features.
[5:20] SPEAKER_00: Yellowstone has half of the world's geysers.
[5:24] SPEAKER_00: What is a geyser exactly?
[5:26] SPEAKER_00: Think of it like a natural pressure cooker.
[5:29] SPEAKER_00: Water from rain and snow seeps deep underground, gets superheated by the volcanic rocks, turns into steam, and then blasts back up through narrow cracks in the earth.
[5:40] SPEAKER_01: Like the one that shoots 17 stories high.
[5:43] SPEAKER_01: What is that one called?
[5:45] SPEAKER_00: That's Old Faithful.
[5:47] SPEAKER_00: In 1870, an exploring group called the Washburn Expedition found it.
[5:52] SPEAKER_00: They named it Old Faithful because it erupted so regularly they felt they could trust it like an old friend.
[5:59] SPEAKER_00: How often does it explode?
[6:01] SPEAKER_00: On average, about every 90 minutes.
[6:04] SPEAKER_00: And the water at the vent is around 203 degrees Fahrenheit.
[6:08] SPEAKER_00: That is literally hot enough to boil pasta.
[6:12] SPEAKER_01: Imagine cooking spaghetti in a geezer.
[6:15] SPEAKER_01: Wait, did anyone try that?
[6:17] SPEAKER_00: Maybe not spaghetti, but early visitors actually used Old Faithful as a laundry machine.
[6:23] SPEAKER_00: They would throw their dirty clothes right into the crater.
[6:27] SPEAKER_00: No way! Did the geezer wash them?
[6:29] SPEAKER_00: It did.
[6:30] SPEAKER_00: The boiling water would shoot the clothes high into the air, and they'd come down perfectly clean.
[6:36] SPEAKER_00: But it destroyed wool clothes, tearing them into pieces.
[6:40] SPEAKER_01: So they protected the land in 1872.
[6:43] SPEAKER_01: And the geezers are still there today.
[6:46] SPEAKER_01: But what about the animals?
[6:48] SPEAKER_01: You mentioned wolves earlier.
[6:50] SPEAKER_00: That is actually one of the most amazing and dramatic stories in Yellowstone's history.
[6:55] SPEAKER_00: When the park was created, grey wolves were roaming everywhere.
[6:59] SPEAKER_00: But by the 1920s, people had hunted them all, and the wolves completely disappeared from the park.
[7:06] SPEAKER_00: Oh no, that's terrible.
[7:08] SPEAKER_00: What happened to the park without them?
[7:10] SPEAKER_00: Everything fell completely out of balance.
[7:13] SPEAKER_00: Without wolves to hunt them, the elk population exploded.
[7:17] SPEAKER_00: By the 1990s, there were nearly 20,000 elk roaming the northern part of the park.
[7:22] SPEAKER_00: 20,000 elk?
[7:24] SPEAKER_01: That's like an entire town made of elk.
[7:27] SPEAKER_01: What's wrong with having a lot of elk?
[7:29] SPEAKER_00: They were eating everything in sight.
[7:31] SPEAKER_00: The elk ate all the young willow and aspen trees along the rivers.
[7:35] SPEAKER_00: They chewed the trees down to tiny stubs.
[7:38] SPEAKER_00: Without tree roots to hold the soil, the riverbank started washing away.
[7:42] SPEAKER_00: So how did they fix it?
[7:44] SPEAKER_00: Did they plant more trees?
[7:45] SPEAKER_00: In 1995 and 1996, scientists finally brought the wolves back.
[7:51] SPEAKER_00: Over those two years, they caught 31 wild grey wolves in Canada, put them in trucks, and drove them 700 miles down to Yellowstone.
[8:00] SPEAKER_00: Did it work?
[8:01] SPEAKER_00: Did the wolves stop the elk?
[8:02] SPEAKER_00: It worked like magic.
[8:04] SPEAKER_00: It caused something called a trophic cascade.
[8:07] SPEAKER_00: The wolves started hunting the elk, so the elk stopped hanging around the open river valleys where they were easy targets.
[8:14] SPEAKER_01: And because the elk moved away and hid in the forests, the trees could finally grow back.
[8:19] SPEAKER_00: Exactly! In some places, the willow trees grew so much taller and healthier.
[8:24] SPEAKER_00: They shot up from tiny chewed stubs to thick, beautiful forests.
[8:29] SPEAKER_00: Go wolves! They saved the trees! But that's not all! Because the trees came back along the rivers, another amazing animal returned to the park.
[8:38] SPEAKER_00: Let me guess.
[8:40] SPEAKER_00: Birds?
[8:41] SPEAKER_00: Birds did come back, but I'm talking about the engineers of the forest.
[8:46] SPEAKER_00: Beavers! In 1995, there was only one beaver colony left in the northern part of the park.
[8:53] SPEAKER_00: But once the willow trees grew back, the beavers had food and wood to build their dams.
[8:59] SPEAKER_00: How many beavers are there now?
[9:01] SPEAKER_00: Now there are at least nine big colonies in that northern area.
[9:05] SPEAKER_00: And when the beavers built dams, it created deep ponds.
[9:09] SPEAKER_00: Those ponds became perfect homes for fish, ducks, otters, and amphibians.
[9:15] SPEAKER_01: Wait, so bringing back just 31 wolves ended up changing the rivers, saving the trees, and bringing back beavers and fish?
[9:24] SPEAKER_01: That is wild!
[9:26] SPEAKER_00: It shows how every single piece of nature is connected.
[9:30] SPEAKER_00: From the supervolcano heating the ground below, to the wolves balancing the food web above.
[9:36] SPEAKER_00: Yellowstone is an incredible living puzzle.
[9:39] SPEAKER_01: Okay, before we do the quiz, do you have any other weird Yellowstone facts?
[9:44] SPEAKER_00: I sure do! Did you know Yellowstone has its own Grand Canyon?
[9:49] SPEAKER_00: It is 20 miles long and has waterfalls that are almost twice as tall as Niagara Falls.
[9:56] SPEAKER_01: Twice as tall?
[9:57] SPEAKER_01: I thought Niagara Falls was the biggest.
[10:00] SPEAKER_00: The lower falls of the Yellowstone River drop an amazing 308 feet.
[10:05] SPEAKER_00: And here's one more weird fact.
[10:07] SPEAKER_00: The park has pools of boiling water that are bright yellow, green, and orange.
[10:13] SPEAKER_00: The colours come from trillions of heat-loving bacteria that actually thrive in boiling water.
[10:19] SPEAKER_01: Ew, boiling bacteria soup.
[10:22] SPEAKER_01: I think I'll stick to swimming in a normal pool.
[10:24] SPEAKER_00: Alright, Finn, it is time for our Yellowstone quiz.
[10:28] SPEAKER_00: Are you ready?
[10:29] SPEAKER_01: I'm ready.
[10:30] SPEAKER_01: Let's see how much I learned about supervolcanoes and wolves.
[10:33] SPEAKER_00: First question.
[10:35] SPEAKER_00: What year did Yellowstone become the very first national park in the world?
[10:43] SPEAKER_00: Next one.
[10:45] SPEAKER_00: What is the name of the famous geezer that shoots up to 184 feet in the air?
[10:54] SPEAKER_00: Question 3.
[10:56] SPEAKER_00: What massive sleeping giant lies miles underneath the park's surface?
[11:05] SPEAKER_00: Here's number four.
[11:07] SPEAKER_00: What animal was brought back to the park in 1995 and 1996 to balance the ecosystem.
[11:18] SPEAKER_00: Last question.
[11:19] SPEAKER_00: What river building animal came back to the park once the trees started growing again?
[11:28] SPEAKER_00: Great job! Let's see how you did.
[11:31] SPEAKER_00: The first answer is, it became a national park in 1872, signed into law by President Ulysses S.
[11:39] SPEAKER_00: Grant.
[11:40] SPEAKER_00: For question two, the famous geezer is called Old Faithful.
[11:46] SPEAKER_00: 3.
[11:47] SPEAKER_00: The answer is a supervolcano.
[11:50] SPEAKER_00: Question 4.
[11:51] SPEAKER_00: They brought back the grey wolves.
[11:54] SPEAKER_00: And the final answer is the beavers.
[11:57] SPEAKER_00: They returned to build their dams.
[11:59] SPEAKER_01: I still can't believe there is a 55-mile-long mush of hot rock just sitting underneath Wyoming.
[12:08] SPEAKER_00: I know! It's mind-blowing! But Eckie's right, we don't have to worry because it hasn't erupted in over 600,000 years.
[12:17] SPEAKER_01: And a huge shout out to the wolves for saving the trees.
[12:21] SPEAKER_01: Nature is just so incredibly cool.
[12:24] SPEAKER_00: If you thought the story of the wolves and the super volcano was amazing, please leave us a five-star review.
[12:30] SPEAKER_00: Just scroll down on your app and tap the stars.
[12:33] SPEAKER_01: It really helps other kids find the show.
[12:35] SPEAKER_01: And if you haven't already, tap follow wherever you are listening, so new episodes just pop up for you.
[12:42] SPEAKER_00: Oh, and we have sister shows too.
[12:44] SPEAKER_00: Science and philosophy's not boring, and maths is not boring.
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[12:51] SPEAKER_01: Want your name on the show, like Byron and Eckie?
[12:55] SPEAKER_01: Send us an email at hello at kidopoly.com.
[12:59] SPEAKER_00: Thanks for exploring Yellowstone with us.
[13:01] SPEAKER_00: See you next time on History's Not Boring.
[13:04] SPEAKER_00: Bye, everyone!

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