Effects On Climate
For more details on this topic, see Snake River Plain (ecoregion).The Snake River Plain has a significant effect on the climate of Yellowstone National Park and the adjacent areas to the south and west of Yellowstone. As the Yellowstone hotspot burned its way across southern Idaho, it left a 70-mile (110 km) wide channel through the Rocky Mountains. This channel is in line with the gap between the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada. The result is a moisture channel extending from the Pacific Ocean to Yellowstone. Moisture from the Pacific Ocean streams onshore in the form of clouds and humid air. It passes through the gap between the Sierra and Cascades and on into the Snake River Plain where it is channeled through most of the Rocky Mountains with no high plateaus nor mountain ranges to impede its progress. It finally encounters upslope conditions at the head of the Snake River Valley at Ashton, Idaho and at Island Park, Idaho, at the Teton Range east of Driggs, Idaho, and at the Yellowstone Plateau of Yellowstone National Park where the channeled moisture precipitates out as rain and snow. The result is a localized climate on the eastern side of the Rockies that is akin to a climate on the west slope of the Cascades or the northern Sierras. The head of the Snake River Valley, the Tetons, and the Yellowstone Plateau receive much more precipitation than other areas of the region and the area is known for being wet, green, having many streams, and having abundant snow in winter.
Read more about this topic: Snake River Plain
Famous quotes containing the words effects and/or climate:
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim to all his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions ... extends so far, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)