Yes, the clouds above the water are blue and red. Or, at least that's the astounding illusion created by the brilliantly colored water, mineral deposits and bacteria create when they reflect sunlight back up into the steam above. You see it from a half mile away and you're sure you're going to need a gas mask to approach any closer. But they let you walk right up to it: 100 yards, 100 ft, still blue and red, you're expecting to choke and die any second now, 10 feet, 5 feet, and then you see that the clouds are really white and smell the same as all the other Yellowstone springs: hydrogen sulfide.
Yellowstone is pretty frikkin amazing.
Mike was there 26 years ago.
Never been back. Probably should, though.
Yes it is. And that’s when it’s dormant.
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be around to see what it’s like in late-stage eruption.
(Last time, 640,000 years ago, it dropped tens or hundreds of meters of welded tuff from California to Iowa, and from the Pecos almost to Lake Winnipeg.
Some day that superplume will blowtorch itself across the plains to the Mississippi, and the geology of the stable interior craton will change dramatically.
we’ve had it too easy. a little global disater is what this species needs!
we’ve had it so briefly
Good records only go back four or five thousand years; much less most places.
Floods are some of our oldest stories, yet we have only the beginnings
of an idea what a “thousand-year flood” might be.
If we survive, someday we’ll have a statistical handle on what
a once-per-ten-thousand-years bolide or volcanic eruption or solar storm
might be like.