I would think that hippos surpass moose in the crankypants department. Though you’d be hard pressed to find wild hippos in North America (but not South America).
We were setting up camp at a designated campground near Bridge Bay, in Yellowstone. It was the closest tent campground to the beginning of of backpack journey starting the next day near Fishing Bridge. All I can recall is sitting at the picnic table facing away from the table. As I spun around around while sitting at the picnic table bench (You know, lift your legs to clear the bench.) to face the table and start making supper, there was the biggest bull moose on the other side of the table staring at me. RIGHT THERE!
Note: The average picnic table is about four feet wide, plus attached benches. (Like this one in Redwoods NP.)
He was there in full glorious height, huge antlers, and SIX FRIGGIN’ FEET away on the other side of the table! (Random comparison image.) I can’t tell you how long we both stared at each other. Escape was impossible, short of diving under the table. All I can remember is after a bit he got bored and just ambled away. I just watched him go, without a care in the world. I’m guessing the total time in our interaction was less than a minute.
It would not be the only time in as many days.
As I said, it was our jumping off spot before our backpacking trip north out of Fishing Bridge. Well, actually start east of Fishing Bridge. We were going to hike north to White Lake, then head west and come out at Canyon. We were up in the White Lake area. Sometime after sunrise we heard some snorting, and huffing and puffing outside of our tent, followed a few seconds later by a big splash. Looking out through the tent door, we saw another moose in the water. It had walked right by the tent, then jumped off of the embankment into the water.
Probably nucleation. Some pools are below the surrounding ground level so a slight breeze just kinda blows overhead. But a strong, swirling kinda wind will catch the pool surface and disturb it enough to upset the quiet balance and the pool starts boiling. I figure the surface disturbance is just enough of a pressure change in the pool to trigger it.
Not all geysers are hot. This one is Cold Water Geyser, powered by carbon dioxide. The YouTube video is from 2011. Reading the notes and comments, the videographer had been studying this geyser for eight years, taking that back to 2003. I came across this geyser by accident in 1979. I reported it to the Lake rangers who were well aware of it, and asked I do not share its location. I asked if I could could back and observe it and they didn’t object. So somewhere between 1979 and 2003 it had achieved some status and a permits were later needed to observe it since it’s off-trail in a geothermal area.
Too bad, too. There is (was?) a really active and large mud volcano called Thumper off-trail in the Mud Volcano area. At the far end of the trail near Sour Lake you used to find a well-beaten trail from the “real” trail that took you to a hidden area of mud pots and mud volcanoes. I think the name came from the sounds it made.
Has it been used to write an episode of CSI? Or is there nowhere in that franchise near enough to even tenuously link it to Yellowstone?
Boiling temperature varies with pressure. This is why pasta takes longer to cook on a mountain top than at sea level; it’s alo why pressure cookers work.
Pressure in a body of water varies with depth. This is why deep-ocean hydrothermal vents can have water temperatures far above 212F without boiling.
If you have a deep body of water, the water at the bottom can become very hot without boiling. If you then move that very hot water toward the surface - as by the evolution of one tiny bubble down in the depths, or a tossed-in rock that displaces some water from down there - the pressure on that superheated water is reduced, and it will boil violently. The evolved bubbles then drive that water violently to the surface. This becomes a self-feeding process, wherein the boiling action enhances circulation, bringing more superheated water up from the depths, and driving cooler surface water down. Eventually there’s no more superheated water down there, and things become stable until that cool water gets heated up, and the system is ready to do its thing again.
Something similar happened at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986. Water at the bottom of the lake was under high pressure, and had dissolved a great deal of CO2. A landslide caused some of that deep water to move toward the surface, in turn causing CO2 to come out of solution. This created a fizzy mixture that drove even more violently toward the surface, eventually causing ALL of that deep water to come to the surface and release a gigantic cloud of CO2 that killed damn near every animal and human being in the area.