We made it to Yellowstone National Park! 1242 miles, 4 kids, and 3 jars of peanut butter later, we find ourselves looking at one of the very few places on earth for there are natural geysers.
We started our tour with on Firehole Lake Drive (which is a road that you can drive on that connects several amazing geysers and hot springs) by looking at the Surprise Pool. When people first discovered it, they tossed in rocks and sand to get it to bubble and “boil” even more, and fortunately their actions didn’t do the spring any real harm (whew!) The deep blue/purple colors are so beautiful.
We continued our drive to the Great Fountain Geyser. We didn’t see this one erupt (thankfully), since it shoots up 100-200 feet high, lasting nearly a full hour of bursts. This geyser takes 10-14 hours to rebuild itself. As the pool slowly fills, you can tell it’s going to erupt because it starts to overflow 70-100 minutes before it starts.
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The White Dome Geyser has a massive cone that indicates its probably been erupting for hundreds of years. When it erupts, it’s not that tall – onlt about 30′ which lasts about 2 minutes, and changes from a spray into steam. It tends to erupt every 30 minutes to 3 hours.
We saw more geysers, and ended up really enjoying Firehole Lake. Several vents bubble out carbon dioxide, heating up the water to 160 deg F (ouch!), which means that the water can carry a more-than-usual amount of calcium. You’ll see the white deposit ring around the lake’s edge.If you see black deposits, those are manganese oxide, and you’ll also find thermophiles in there! Can you see both in the video below?
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We had to stop by Old Faithful of course! In the Upper Geyser Basin, we found Old Faithful, which is one of the largest three geyer basincs along Firehole River. Old Faithful erupts more frequently than ano of the other big geysers, but it’s not the largest or the most regular at Yellowstone. It’s average interval is about 90 minutes, and the eruption lasts 2-5 minutes long, expelling 3700-8400 gallons of boiling hot water up to nearly 200 feet in the air.
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Here it is erupting real-time (the ground was shaking!)
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and here it is in the last stages:
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That was such a beautiful, amazing sight!
There are lots of other things in the park besides geysers, though. We saw hot springs (water circulating up to the surface and bubbling up, where heat escapes through evaporation or by running off. There are also fumaroles, Yellowstone’s hottest surface features. They vent steam bu having their underground plumbing reach way down into the hot rock. The mudpots are acidic features with very little water – the hydrogen sulfide rises from deep with the earth is used by microorganisms as an energy source and they convert the gas into sulfuric acid which breaks down the rocks into the bubbling clay you see.
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Why would NASA be studying Yellowstone?
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