24 in 2024: A Year of Eclipses, Cicadas, Auroras and Anniversaries in the Parks

In 2024, the sky, the ground and the insects all put on shows in America's national parks. The Park Service's Explore Nature team picked 24 science and nature highlights from the year. Here they are, grouped.

The sky and the earth

• A total solar eclipse, on April 8, crossed the country from Texas to Maine, passing over 27 park units in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
• Northern lights far south. With the sun at the peak of its 11-year cycle — a solar maximum — auroras were seen several times at southern latitudes, even in Florida. NASA called the May 2024 storm the strongest to reach Earth in two decades, and possibly among the strongest aurora displays in 500 years.

The northern lights over Yellowstone National Park. NPS / Jacob W. Frank.

• A steam blast at Yellowstone. On July 23, a hydrothermal explosion in Biscuit Basin threw steam and debris hundreds of feet into the air, wrecked a boardwalk, and hurled grapefruit-sized rocks tens to hundreds of feet. Visitors caught it on camera, and it quickly drew wide media attention.

The damaged boardwalk after the Biscuit Basin explosion. NPS / Jacob W. Frank.

• A double cicada emergence. In spring, billions of cicadas came up across the Midwest and Southeast as Brood XIII (a 17-year group) and Brood XIX (a 13-year group) emerged together. The next joint emergence of these two broods is 221 years away.

One of the billions. NPS / Nortrup.

Anniversaries

• Big Thicket and Big Cypress national preserves turned 50; Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve turned 100.

Anniversary graphics for the three parks. NPS photos and graphics.

• 71 National Natural Landmarks reached their golden anniversaries: 50 years of voluntary conservation by their owners and managers.
• Rainwater monitoring for air pollution turned 40 at Little Bighorn Battlefield, North Cascades and Guadalupe Mountains.

Cascade Pass, North Cascades National Park. NPS photo.

• The Dragonfly Mercury Project, run by the Park Service and USGS, marked 10 years of citizen scientists collecting dragonfly larvae for mercury testing.

Dragonfly Mercury Project volunteers at Saguaro National Park. NPS / Colleen Flanagan Pritz.

Honours

• Grazer won Fat Bear Week again — back-to-back champion, and one of the most successful bears at bulking up for winter.

Grazer, Fat Bear Week 2024 champion. NPS photo.

• Vincent Santucci, a Park Service paleontologist with nearly 40 years of service, received the 2024 Stephen Tyng Mather Award from the National Parks Conservation Association. It cited work including the discovery of 30,000-year-old bats at Grand Canyon, a new fossil shark at Mammoth Cave and trackways at White Sands.

Santucci beside a block of Navajo Sandstone with large dinosaur tracks at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Image from the National Park Service's page.

• In May, the Park Service's Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate won a "Climate Champion" award for the 2022 Climate Friendly Parks effort behind its Climate Action Plan.

A climate station in the Brooks Range, Noatak National Preserve. NPS photo.

Conservation, funded

• Two new National Natural Landmarks — Independence Creek Preserve, a Texas desert oasis, in July, and the Nantucket Barrier Beach and Wildlife Refuge in December — brought the total to 606.
• The Inflation Reduction Act, law for two years, had put $210 million into park health: wildlife and plants, landscape-scale conservation, jobs for young people, cultural heritage and healthy places for recreation.

New River Gorge and Southeastern Grasslands Institute staff check grassland restoration in West Virginia. NPS / Casey Reese.

• The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law marked three years of restoring ecosystems and adding recreation.

Park staff backfill an abandoned mine site at Saguaro National Park. NPS / Adam Springer.

• Both laws are funding a multi-agency effort to save whitebark pine, one of America's most threatened and ecologically valuable trees, and a landscape-scale push to protect the best of the sagebrush country, now half its former extent.

Whitebark pine at Crater Lake National Park. NPS / Jen Hooke.

Sagebrush at Craters of the Moon. Bureau of Land Management / Bob Wick.

• Five youth programs backed by the Inflation Reduction Act — a YMCA partnership, the Landscape Stewardship Corps, Community Volunteer Ambassadors, the Pacific Islands Conservation Corps and Scientists-in-Parks — helped parks from Maine to Guam and the Caribbean to Alaska prepare for a changing climate.

The Landscape Stewardship Corps. NPS photo.

Greener parks, cleaner shores

• In September, Zion launched the Park Service's first all-electric transit fleet.

Zion's electric shuttles. NPS / Abi Farish.

• Two new marine debris exhibits, at Isle Royale and New Bedford Whaling, made eleven from the partnership with NOAA's Marine Debris Program, each featuring local artists.
• The Park Service published simple conservation actions people can take at home.

Conservation starts at home. NPS photo.

Telling the science

• I Didn't Know That! explained cicadas, ecological restoration and wild rivers, and ran a mini-series on the seven Leave No Trace principles.

The Leave No Trace mini-series. NPS photo.

• Park Science magazine's summer issue looked at how scientists study extreme weather — and other extremes that affect science itself.
• Outside Science (inside parks), made with Colorado State University, added four episodes, from peregrine falcon recovery to hydrothermal features.

An episode on Yellowstone's hydrology. NPS / Ron Bend.

• The National Fossil Day artwork showed ancient life in the upper Glen Canyon Group — the Kayenta Formation and Navajo Sandstone — at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

This year’s National Fossil Day artwork celebrates the unique geology along the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Park. NPS.

Sources

Based on "24 in 2024: An Explore Nature Year in Review," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.