Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
Steamboat Geyser is impressive. When it really gets going, it can spew water 300 feet in the air. That’s far higher than anything its neighbors in Yellowstone National Park’s Norris Basin can accomplish. In fact, Steamboat is considered the tallest active geyser in the world.
It’s also pretty sleepy. According to the geyser monitoring site GeyserTimes, while more active geysers may roar to life weekly or daily, Steamboat generally saves up its strength for very occasional blasts. In the past, it has slumbered for whole months, or even years, at a time. Once, it almost missed an entire decade: Between August 26, 1968 and March 28, 1978, it made not a peep.
So it was surprising when this past spring—after a three-and-a-half-year period of silence—Steamboat erupted three times in quick succession. In a recent blog post on the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory website, USGS scientists detailed the latest outbursts. The first happened on March 15, around 5:30 a.m. No humans caught the action, “but the activity was detected by a nearby seismometer, temperature gauges, and water discharge at a USGS stream gage,” they write. Plus,…
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