This week in my class we have been learning about geysers.I have learned a lot about then now I hope reading this text you will understand why.
There are three reasons why it’s important to study geysers. First, geysers are a model for how volcanoes erupt. And we care about how they erupt, what initiates the eruption, how everything rises to the surface, how it gets transported in the atmosphere. Volcanoes are big and dangerous, and they don’t erupt very often. Geysers are small, and much less dangerous, and they erupt many times. And one of the things we hope to learn from geysers is how to understand and model eruptions more generally. We can also deploy a range of geophysical instruments at geysers. We can use seismometers to measure ground motion, we can measure electric and magnetic fields, we can take videos, and we can try and integrate all these different types of measurements to understand what happens during an eruption. And then we can try to transfer this understanding from small geysers to big volcanoes.
The second reason that we care about geysers is that they are a window into how the Earth transports hot water. There are features called geothermal systems which we use for geothermal energy, and geothermal systems make materials like gold deposits. By transporting hot fluids, you can transport all of the elements that dissolve in water. And when we look at a geyser we get a window into how the Earth is transporting a mixture of steam and water.
And the third reason is that they are interesting, fascinating natural phenomena. If we understand how the Earth transports fluids and energy, we should be able to explain how geysers work. And the extent to which we can’t do so tells us that there’s basic things about the heat transport of the Earth that we don’t know yet
