Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/24/yellowstone-hydrothermal-explosion-footage.html
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Wait…I was told that everything in Yellowstone is perfectly safe and provided for educational purposes. By the way, Take my picture next to this huge bison, willya?
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Tourons gonna touron.
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(Glad no one was hurt)
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Geologist breakdown of event:
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Steam explosions are nasty! Under pressure, the steam is super-heated, well above sea-level boiling temperature. During the explosion, as it expands, it’s inherently cooler, but near-boiling steam will melt your face off, with the “wind-chill” working backwards.
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And people say geology is boring!
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Tbf, it looks like they keep to the walkways provided by the park when they’re involved in a rare geological event.
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How dare they - we’ve got earthquakes, volcanoes and dinosaurs on our side.
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And that’s absolutely nothing compared to the 1 in 700,000 years supervolcano eruptions.
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30 years ago, this would not have been caught on camera for all of us to see.
Now that pretty much everyone has a camera on them pretty much all the time, rare events like this are increasingly being captured.
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ISWYDT
(And we need a 46-second video, now, just to show two photos? Twice? Sheesh!)
(And not blaming BB here. Just commenting on the dumb culture that thinks this is necessary.)
It basically terrifies me the horrors, unreportable except by the most ghoulish media, that are filmed more or less daily. The world becomes overwhelming when you can see it all at once.
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True. There are some upsides. For example, all those “cops behaving badly” videos that have come out in the last few years. People KNEW that shit like that was going on, but couldn’t prove anything. Now, they can.
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Even quiescent hot springs in Yellowstone can erupt unexpectedly, sometimes violently:
Excelsior Geyser
Ear Spring
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That’ll buff right out!
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I remember reading a post (on Reddit, I think) from a former UFO true believer.
Back in the 80s, he was totally convinced that something was going on and it was only a matter of time before someone caught it on camera. But as time passed, and cameras became more and more common, nothing happened. All kinds of other things were documented that had never been filmed, but not that. And eventually he realized that there was nothing going on.
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I’ve always been disappointed that Geysir in Iceland has never erupted when I’ve been there. As its name suggests, it was regularly throwing water as high as 80m in the early 20th Century, but then went into decline. For a while, the Icelandic government authorised it to be ‘soaped’ on Independence Day to trigger an eruption, but it grew even less reliable and turned into a large simmering pool. There was a resumption of activity in and around 2000 after some nearby seismic activity, but that was short-lived.
The nearby Strokkur is still fantastically reliable and worth a trip - stay on the paths, stay upwind and everything is cool.
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