The world’s largest active geyser

Old Faithful might be the most famous of Yellowstone National Park’s 500 geysers, but it’s puny compared with Steamboat Geyser, said Kastalia Medrano in Thrillist.com. When Steamboat erupts—as it has unusually often this year—it shoots boiling water 300 feet into the sky, “sometimes showering the parking lot a quarter-mile away.” The first burst can topple trees, and for days after, “steam blows out so loudly you have to yell to be heard.” The unpredictable geyser had gone decades without erupting, but it’s blown 24 times since March. When I visited the day after an eruption, “people all over the park were talking about it with the sort of rapidly inflating excitement you’d associate with hot streaks in baseball games.” Geology isn’t always big on drama, but there’s a reason why even people who find science boring love Yellowstone: “It lets us watch the planet’s most fascinating extremes playing out in real time.”