Christa asks:
"I've always wondered how geyers work and how old faithful can be old faithful.
Thanks."
You know, I was wondering about that too. Last year My wife and I went to Yellowstone National Park, the land of geysers. Having never been before, I found the steaming vents, bubbling mud, and spewing geysers absolutely fascinating. We went in September, after all of the big crowds had left and were really blessed to be able to wander through the geyser field near Old Faithful early in the morning surrounded by billowing steam and frost covered trees. It was really beautiful. The photo below is one I took of Grand Geyser, one of largest in Yellowstone.
Christa, you wanted to know how geysers work. The best explaination I found was in Geology.com. The information below is taken directly from their site.
"A geyser is a vent in Earth’s surface that periodically ejects a column of hot water and steam. Even a small geyser is an amazing phenomenon; however some geysers have eruptions that blast thousands of gallons of boiling hot water up to a few hundred feet in the air.
"To understand how a geyser works, you must first understand the relationship between water and steam. Steam is a gaseous form of water. Steam is produced when water is heated to its boiling point. When water converts into steam at surface conditions it undergoes an enormous expansion because steam occupies 1600 times as much space as the original volume of original water. The eruption of a geyser is powered by a "steam explosion" when boiling hot water suddenly expands into the much more voluminous steam.
If you have a fissure or hole in the earth that contains water from top to bottom, all you have to do is add heat, lots of heat, to the water at the bottom of the column of water. When the deep water reaches the boiling point and suddenly converts to steam, the sudden expansion forces the cooler water above it up to the surface with amazing speed and force. It's kind of like shooting off a cannon, except geysers use water suddenly converted to steam as the gunpowder, the cooler water above the steam as the "bullet", and the fissure in the earth as the barrel.
As to why Old Faithful is so faithful, it all depends on the physical geology of Old Faithful's vent and underground plumbing and the available supply of water. The Yellowstone.net website reports that the time of the next eruption is dependent on the length of the last eruption. Follow the link and look at "Predicting Old Faithful" to see the method park rangers use to post the time of the next eruption.
If you haven't been to Yellowstone, I highly recommend going. It's a great place to visit.
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