File:Old Faithful and Great Fountain geysers (1905).jpg

Identifier: yellowstonenational00chit (find matches)
Title: The Yellowstone national park, historical and descriptive, illustrated with maps, views and portraits
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Chittenden, Hiram Martin, 1858-1917
Subjects:
Publisher: Cincinnati : The R. Clarke company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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cases the springs and geysers have nounderground connection with each other. Water in con-tiguous pools stands at different levels, and powerful gey-sers play with no apparent effect upon others near by. It is another interesting question to know whence comesthe water for these geysers and hot springs. Into the hid-den caverns of Old Faithful flow perhaps a quarter ofa million gallons per hour. This is a large stream, but itis a mere trifle compared with the entire outflow of hotwater throughout the Park. The subterranean passages bywhich the necessary supply is furnished to all these thou-sands of springs, certainly constitute the most intricateand extensive system of water-works of which there is anyknowledge. Xot the least wonderful of the features of the great gey-sers are the marvelous formations which surround them,more exquisitely beautiful than any production of art.Tliey are much finer than those to be found around theordinary quiescent springs. The falling or dashing of the
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Cone and Fountain Geysers (Old Faithful and the GreatFountain). GEYSERS. 209 hot water seems to bo essential to the most perfect results.To say that thtse rocky formations simulate cauliflower,sponge, fleeces of wool, flowers or bead-work, conveys buta feeble idea of their marvelous beauty. It is indeed amost interesting fact that nature here produces in stone,by the process of deposition, the identical forms elsewhereproduced by the Yery different processes of animal andvegetable life. These formations are all silica and are of flinty hard-ness. Bunsen, and Prof. Le Conte following him, assert itto be a rule that the presence of silica in the water is essen-tial to the development of a geyser. In one sense this istrue, and in another it is not. Should the heated watersfind a ready-made tube, like a fissure in solid rock, thiswould serve for a geyser tube as well as any other. TheMonarch Geyser, in Xorris Geyser Basin, seems to haveoriginated in this way. But in the general case, geys

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