3809 x 2370 px | 32,2 x 20,1 cm | 12,7 x 7,9 inches | 300dpi
Data acquisizione:
8 febbraio 2012
Altre informazioni:
Katmai National Park and Preserve is a United States National Park in southern Alaska, notable for the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and for its brown bears. The park and preserve covers 4, 093, 077 acres (6, 395.43 sq mi; 16, 564.09 km2), being roughly the size of Wales. Most of this is a designated wilderness area, including 3, 473, 000 acres (5, 427 sq mi; 14, 050 km2). The park is named after Mount Katmai, its centerpiece stratovolcano. The park is located on the Alaska Peninsula, across from Kodiak Island, with headquarters in nearby King Salmon, about 290 miles (470 km) southwest of Anchorage. The area was first designated a national monument in 1918 to protect the area around the major 1912 volcanic eruption of Novarupta, which formed the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a 40-square-mile (100 km2), 100-to-700-foot-deep (30 to 210 m) pyroclastic flow. The park includes as many as 18 individual volcanoes, seven of which have been active since 1900. Following its designation, the monument was left undeveloped and largely unvisited until the 1950s. Initially designated because of its violent volcanic history, the monument and surrounding lands became appreciated for their abundance of sockeye salmon, the brown bears that fed upon them, and a wide variety of other Alaskan wildlife and marine life. After a series of boundary expansions, the present national park and preserve were established in 1980 under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980.
