This Yellowstone Geyser spits a nipple from the 1930s and many other wastes | Smart News

At the end of September, the typically tame Geyser of Ear Spring in Yellowstone National Park erupted with a violent explosion that projected up to 30 feet of water in the air. Among the debris that sprang from the geyser during the eruption, there were not only rocks and earth, pieces of human garbage, some of which are decades old.

Park officials have discovered objects such as a cement block, aluminum cans, cigarette butts, a rubber heel, a straw 20 cm long, nearly 100 coins and a baby pacifier from the 1930s, as Brandon Specktor reports. LiveScience.

"The water had just run down the sidewalk and thrown garbage all around," said Rebecca Roland, a guard at the Yellowstone National Park Watch Park, CBS News.

Ear Spring is located on Geyser Hill, not far from Old Faithful, the most famous thermal device in Yellowstone. According to United States Geological Survey (USGS), Ear Spring has experienced a small eruption as recently as 2004, but an explosion as strong as last month has not been seen since 1957.

Since the eruption at Ear Spring, the thermal characteristics of Geyser Hill have intensified and the heated soil zone could continue to expand and change for several years. According to USGS, such changes are "current events" and are not related to Yellowstone's business. supervolcano, which shows no signs of eruption anytime soon.

"Changes in hydrothermal systems occur only in the upper part of the hundred meters of the earth's crust," USGS explains on their website, "and are not directly related to magma movements of several kilometers deep."

As some of the recently released Ear Spring wastes are "clearly historic", they could be inventoried by conservators and listed in the Yellowstone archives. Facebook. But that does not mean that visitors to Yellowstone should feel free to continue throwing garbage in geysers for the sake of posterity.

"You may think that if you throw something in a hot spring or in a geyser, it will disappear, but it will not disappear," says Roland CBS. "It stays in place and what happens normally is that you can actually hook up a feature and kill it. And that has happened in many places in the park. "

So, as Yellowstone says in her statement, the next time Ear Spring breaks out, let's hope "it's nothing but natural rocks and water."

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