59 Fun Facts About Geysers

The word 'geyser', borrowed from the name of one hot spring, means what?

Gusher is the sense of Old Norse geysa, 'to gush'; travel writers of the 1700s took Geysir, the name of one famous spring, as their word for every spring that spouts.

The Great Geysir, which gave its name to every geyser on Earth, is in which country?

The Great Geysir is in Iceland's Haukadalur valley, where in 1846 the chemist Robert Bunsen, of Bunsen-burner fame, took the measurements behind the modern explanation of why geysers erupt.

Roughly what share of the world's geysers are in Yellowstone National Park?

About half of the world's geysers are in Yellowstone, more than 500 in all, yet its most famous one, Old Faithful, is neither the tallest nor the largest of them.

Where does the water that erupts from Yellowstone's geysers come from?

Seeping rainwater supplies it: rain and melted snow sink deep through the rock, are superheated there and driven back to the surface, so every eruption is recycled weather.

Which geyser's major eruptions top 300 feet, far above Old Faithful's, making it the world's tallest active geyser?

Steamboat Geyser is the tallest active geyser on Earth; once the water of a major eruption is spent, it roars on with steam alone for hours, and sometimes for days.

The world's tallest active geyser sits in which Yellowstone basin?

Norris Geyser Basin is its home, and the plumbing is shared: after each major eruption, nearby Cistern Spring drains and takes days to refill.

What did the world's tallest active geyser do after a major eruption in 1911?

Went dormant for 50 years: no major eruption came until 1961, yet in 2019 and 2020 the same geyser set a record of 48 major eruptions a year.

Old Faithful was named in 1870 by which expedition?

The Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition chose the name after watching the geyser spout nine times at regular intervals during a stay of barely a day and a half.

On average, how long is the gap between Old Faithful's eruptions?

About 90 minutes is the closest answer: averages quoted run from about 90 to 100 minutes, and despite the legend Old Faithful has never erupted at exact hourly intervals.

Old Faithful erupts in which US state?

Wyoming holds Old Faithful and 96% of Yellowstone, yet the park is older than the state: it was created in 1872, and Wyoming joined the Union in 1890.

Since 1939, the average wait between Old Faithful's eruptions has done what?

Lengthened, by more than 20 minutes, yet the name still fits: Old Faithful remains one of the few geysers regular enough for rangers to predict.

Old Faithful, which fires a steady jet from a low mound, is which of the two main geyser types?

Old Faithful is a cone geyser: its narrow vent acts like a nozzle and fires one steady column, where fountain geysers burst in all directions from an open pool.

What is the tallest predictable geyser on Earth?

Grand Geyser empties its pool with every eruption and takes hours to refill, so a full pool and a waiting crowd are the signs that the next show is close.

Geyserite, the deposit that coats geysers, is a form of what?

Geyserite is opaline silica: hot water dissolves silica from rocks such as rhyolite, and as it cools the silica drops out as opal, which slowly recrystallises into quartz.

The heat that drives a geyser comes from what?

Geysers are driven by magma close to the surface, which is why nearly all lie in areas of recent volcanic activity such as the Yellowstone caldera.

What feature of a geyser's underground plumbing sets it apart from an ordinary hot spring?

A geyser's plumbing has constrictions that build pressure as they trap water; cooler water above presses on hotter water beneath like a pressure-cooker lid, letting it superheat until it flashes to steam.

Which bacterium, first described from a Yellowstone hot spring in 1969, gave biotechnology its key PCR enzyme?

Thermus aquaticus thrives in water of about 70 °C, so its Taq polymerase survives the repeated heating that PCR demands, which destroyed the enzyme used before it.

The world's second-largest geyser field, the Valley of Geysers, is on which Russian peninsula?

Kamchatka kept the secret a long time: the valley was unknown to science until April 1941, when geologist Tatyana Ustinova and her guide followed a river upstream and saw a geyser erupt.

Which gas gives the mud pots found beside many geysers their rotten-egg smell?

Hydrogen sulphide does more than smell: it is turned into sulphuric acid, which breaks the surrounding rock down into the clay that makes the mud.

In June 2007, what buried much of Russia's Valley of Geysers?

A mudflow set off by a landslide covered about two-thirds of the valley, but the loss proved smaller than feared: the water behind it soon fell and Velikan, one of the largest geysers, kept erupting.

What is the only feasible way for visitors to reach the Valley of Geysers?

Helicopter flights are the only way in, because the valley lies inside a remote, strictly protected nature reserve.

El Tatio, the largest geyser field in the Southern Hemisphere, is in the Andes of which country?

Chile's El Tatio sits so high in the Andes, about 4,300 metres up, that water there boils at only about 86 °C.

In Britain, 'geyser' was also the everyday name for which household item?

A water heater: British homes borrowed the spring's name for the gas heater that supplied their hot water, and in South Africa a geyser is still the household hot-water tank.

How high did eruptions of Waimangu, the largest geyser ever known, reach in the early 1900s?

Waimangu's blasts reached about 460 metres, far above any geyser erupting today, but lasted only from 1900 to 1904; the great volcanic eruption of 1886 is thought to have created its plumbing.

The name Waimangu, given by Māori, means what?

Waimangu is Māori for 'black waters' (wai, water; mangu, black), because the geyser hurled up water darkened by rocks and mud from the surrounding terrain.

Tours to El Tatio, a geyser field high in the Andes, are timed to arrive at which time of day?

Dawn: tours set out at about four in the morning because the extreme cold around sunrise makes the columns of steam stand out at their most dramatic.

One of four sightseers killed at Waimangu in 1903 was an international in which sport?

Rugby player Joe Warbrick, captain of the 1888 Natives team that toured the British Isles, ignored his guide brother's calls to move back and was swept away with three others by a sudden eruption.

Strokkur, the reliable geyser in the Haukadalur valley, has a name meaning what?

Churn, as in a butter churn, is what the name means; each eruption begins with the pool swelling upward before the surface breaks and the jet shoots out.

How often does Strokkur typically erupt?

Strokkur erupts roughly every 6 to 10 minutes, a regularity that makes it one of the few natural geysers tourists can count on seeing during a short visit.

Strokkur has erupted regularly since 1963, when locals did what on the advice of the Geysir Committee?

Locals cleared out its blocked conduit through the bottom of the basin, and the fix has held: Strokkur has been the valley's main geyser ever since.

The Great Geysir is one of three main stops on which famous tourist driving loop?

The Golden Circle also takes in Gullfoss waterfall and Þingvellir, but its geyser star has retired: Geysir now barely spouts and its neighbour Strokkur does the performing.

In dormant periods, eruptions of the Great Geysir were induced on special occasions by adding what?

Adding soap, which lowers the water's surface tension, was used to force the Great Geysir to erupt on special occasions such as the national day; environmental concerns made the practice rare in the 1990s.

What tends to revive or create the geysers of Haukadalur?

Earthquakes do the work: quakes in 1294 set the valley's springs spouting, and others in June 2000 woke the Great Geysir after decades of near silence.

Pōhutu, the largest geyser in the Southern Hemisphere, is in the Whakarewarewa valley of which country?

Pōhutu is in New Zealand's Whakarewarewa valley; after a long decline it grew markedly livelier once nearby hot-water wells used for home heating were shut in the late 1980s.

The geyser once known as Pōhutu's Indicator is named for a prince's what?

Feathers: the Prince of Wales Feathers geyser was first called the Indicator, because it usually began to play shortly before Pōhutu erupted.

Two large geyser fields in Nevada, including Beowawe, were drained dry by wells drilled to supply what?

Geothermal power plants were the goal: wells sunk at Beowawe in 1959 drew off the hot water, and within a year its geysers had stopped and its springs had dried up.

What drowned most of the Orakei Korako geyser field in 1961?

A dam's lake: the Waikato River was dammed to generate hydroelectricity, and the rising Lake Ohakuri drowned some 70 geysers and 200 hot springs.

Fly Ranch's first accidental geyser came from a 1916 well drilled in search of what?

The 1916 well sought irrigation water but struck near-boiling water and was abandoned; a mineral mound grew over it, and an energy company's 1964 test well nearby created today's Fly Geyser.

Which organisation bought Fly Ranch, including its multicoloured geyser, in 2016?

The Burning Man Project knew the land well: in 1997 the festival's whole temporary city was built on Fly Ranch, and it still gathers each year in the desert next door.

Fly Geyser's vivid green and red colours come from what?

Thermophilic microbes coat the mound in green and red; as in Yellowstone's hot springs, each kind suits its own temperature, so the colours follow the heat.

The Andernach Geyser on the Rhine, the world's tallest cold-water geyser, is driven by which gas?

Carbon dioxide dissolved in the groundwater does the work, just as in a shaken bottle of fizzy water: as the gas bubbles expand in the well, they push the whole column out.

Andernach's cold-water geyser, the tallest of its kind, erupts beside the Rhine in which country?

Germany: the geyser stands in a protected nature reserve on a peninsula in the river, so the only way for visitors to reach it is by boat.

Soda Springs Geyser in Idaho, a capped 1937 drilling accident, erupts on what schedule?

Every hour on the hour, by timer: the town struck the geyser in 1937 while drilling for hot water for a bathing pool, then capped the runaway well.

Enceladus, the jet-spouting moon about as wide as Arizona, measures roughly how far across?

Enceladus is only about 500 km across, one-seventh the width of Earth's Moon, yet its south-polar jets make it one of the most geologically active bodies in the Solar System.

Which spacecraft discovered the plumes of Enceladus during flybys that began in 2005?

Cassini spotted the plumes during close flybys in 2005, then flew straight through them on later passes to sample their ice and gas directly.

Enceladus, the small moon whose jets spray ice into space, orbits which planet?

Saturn: the grains spread out along the moon's orbit to form the E ring, so tiny Enceladus is in effect building a ring of its own.

Eruptions of which substance have been observed on Neptune's moon Triton?

Voyager 2 photographed plumes of nitrogen gas and dust rising about 8 km above Triton in 1989, probably driven by sunlight warming dark material under clear nitrogen ice in a solid-state greenhouse effect.

Which Yellowstone geyser has a small 'Indicator' neighbour that often erupts before it?

Beehive Geyser fooled its namers: the 1870 expedition did not think the small mound was a geyser at all until it shot a column some 200 feet high during their last breakfast.

Riverside Geyser shoots a 75-foot arch, sometimes with a rainbow, over which Yellowstone waterway?

The Firehole River runs right beside it, and because the geyser fires at an angle instead of straight up, its 75-foot jet arches across the water.

Which structure did a large Upper Geyser Basin geyser's sinter mound resemble when named in 1870?

A castle: its crenellated sinter mound is one of the largest in the world, and each eruption adds another thin layer, so the turrets that earned the name keep changing shape.

Fresh ice from its own jets gives the moon Enceladus which Solar System record?

Most reflective surface: its coat of fresh ice bounces back most of the sunlight that hits it, which is also why the surface stays near −200 °C even at noon.

Which president signed the 1872 law that made Yellowstone the world's first national park?

Ulysses S. Grant signed it on 1 March 1872, after William Henry Jackson's photographs and Thomas Moran's paintings of Yellowstone's wonders won over Congress.

When 19th-century soldiers used Old Faithful as a laundry, which fabric came out torn to shreds?

Wool came off worst: an 1883 park guidebook reports that General Sheridan's men found linen and cotton washed unharmed in the crater, while woollen clothes were torn to shreds.

A vent that emits steam and volcanic gases but no liquid or solid material is called what?

A fumarole vents only steam and gases such as sulphur dioxide; fumaroles mark late-stage volcanism but can also precede eruptions, so they are monitored for prediction.

Since the 1920s, water from Iceland's hot springs has been piped to do what?

Heat greenhouses to grow food: the hot water lets Icelanders raise tomatoes, cucumbers and even bananas that their cold climate would otherwise rule out.

Which Yellowstone giant, once capable of 300-foot eruptions, has behaved as a hot spring since 1985?

Excelsior Geyser is thought to have wrecked its own plumbing with the violent eruptions of the 1880s; its crater now pours more than 4,000 gallons a minute into the river beside it.

Americans rhyme 'geyser' with 'miser', but in Britain it rhymes with which word?

Freezer: British dictionaries usually give the first syllable as 'gee', which makes a geyser and a geezer sound exactly alike there.

Geyser-like gas jets are thought to burst through thawing polar ice each spring on which planet?

Mars: nobody has seen the jets directly, but scientists think spring sunlight warms the ground under the seasonal ice cap until trapped gas bursts out, leaving dark fans and spider-shaped channels.

The Old Faithful Inn, opened beside the geyser in 1904, is one of the few surviving American hotels built of what?

Logs and twisted branches frame its towering lobby: architect Robert Reamer wanted the building's lopsided look to echo the chaos of nature.