The Great Fountain Geyser is a fountain-type geyser located in the Firehole Lake area of Lower Geyser Basin of

Yellowstone National Park Yellowstone National Park is a List of national parks of the United States, national park of the United States located in the northwest corner of Wyoming, with small portions extending into Montana and Idaho. It was established by the 42nd U ...

, Wyoming. It is the only Lower Geyser Basin feature that the park makes predictions for.

Eruption

The geyser erupts every 9 to 15 hours. Great Fountain's maximum height ranges from about to over . Its duration is usually about one hour but durations of over two hours have been seen. The duration of an eruption affects the interval that will elapse before the next eruption, so that if the duration of an eruption is recorded, the time of the following eruption can be predicted to a precision of about two hours. Around 1-2 hours the geyser overflows and drains until it gets so strong it reaches 1 meter and this is the start of the first burst. The prediction can be refined to plus or minus 15 minutes or so, through observation of overflow from the crater during the period between eruptions. While this pattern of behavior is observed most of the time, there are occasional episodes of so-called "wild-phase" activity during which the eruptions are of greatly extended duration and intervals between eruptions may be as long as three days. The geyser is then unpredictable until wild-phase activity ceases and more normal eruptions resume. Nearby White Dome Geyser, which erupts considerably more frequently (albeit less powerfully) from a large

geyserite Geyserite, or siliceous sinter, is a form of opaline silica that is often found as crusts or layers around hot springs and geysers. Botryoidal geyserite is known as fiorite. Geyserite is porous due to the silica enclosing many small cavities. Si ...

cone, is easily seen from the same parking lot that affords a viewpoint for Great Fountain. The

thermophilic A thermophile is a type of extremophile that thrives at relatively high temperatures, between . Many thermophiles are archaea, though some of them are bacteria and fungi. Thermophilic eubacteria are suggested to have been among the earliest bact ...

bacterium Bacteria (; : bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were among the ...

Thermus aquaticus ''Thermus aquaticus'' is a species of bacteria that can tolerate high temperatures, one of several thermophile, thermophilic bacteria that belong to the ''Deinococcota'' phylum. It is the source of the heat-resistant enzyme Taq polymerase, ''Taq' ...

'', important because it produces an

enzyme An enzyme () is a protein that acts as a biological catalyst by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrate (chemistry), substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different mol ...

used in

polymerase chain reaction The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a method widely used to make millions to billions of copies of a specific DNA sample rapidly, allowing scientists to amplify a very small sample of DNA (or a part of it) sufficiently to enable detailed st ...

laboratory procedures central to modern

molecular biology Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecule, molecular basis of biological activity in and between Cell (biology), cells, including biomolecule, biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactio ...

, was first isolated from Mushroom Pool, a non-eruptive

hot spring A hot spring, hydrothermal spring, or geothermal spring is a Spring (hydrology), spring produced by the emergence of Geothermal activity, geothermally heated groundwater onto the surface of the Earth. The groundwater is heated either by shallow ...

a few hundred feet from White Dome Geyser.

References

External links

* {{Wyoming Geothermal features of Yellowstone National Park Geothermal features of Teton County, Wyoming Geysers of Teton County, Wyoming Geysers of Wyoming