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Old Faithful...

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Old Faithful is a cone geyser located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, United States. It was named in 1870 during the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition and was the first geyser in the park to receive a name. Old Faithful can vary in height from 100-180 feet with an average near 130-140 feet. More than 1,000,000 eruptions have been recorded.  Harry Woodward  first described a mathematical relationship between the  duration  and  intervals  of the eruptions in 1938.Old Faithful is not the tallest or largest geyser in the park; those titles belong to the less predictable  Steamboat Geyser .The reliability of Old Faithful can be attributed to the fact that it is not connected to any other thermal features of the  Upper  Geyser Basin . The average height of an eruption is 145 feet (44 m). Intervals between eruptions can range from 35 to 120 minutes, averaging 66.5 minutes in 1939,  slowly increasing to an average of 90 minutes apart today, which may be the result of  e
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Snowflake Formation...

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A snowflake begins to form when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky.  This creates an ice crystal. As the ice crystal falls to the ground, water vapor freezes onto the primary crystal, building new crystals – the six arms of the snowflake. The ice crystals that make up snowflakes are symmetrical (or patterned) because they reflect the internal order of the crystal’s water molecules as they arrange themselves in predetermined spaces (known as “crystallization”) to form a six-sided snowflake.  Ultimately, it is the temperature at which a crystal forms — and to a lesser extent the humidity of the air — that determines the basic shape of the ice crystal.  Thus, we see long needle-like crystals at 23 degrees F and very flat plate-like crystals at 5 degrees F.   The intricate shape of a single arm of the snowflake is determined by the atmospheric conditions experienced by entire ice crystal as it falls.  A crystal might begin to
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Sailing Stones....

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Sailing stones , also known as  sliding rocks ,  walking rocks ,  rolling stones , and  moving rocks , are a  geological phenomenon  where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. Instead, rocks move when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick floating in an ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. These thin floating ice panels, frozen during cold winter nights, are driven by wind and  shove  rocks at up to 5 m/min. Trails of sliding rocks have been observed and studied in various locations, including Little Bonnie Claire Playa in Nevada,and most famously at  Racetrack Playa ,  Death Valley National Park , California, where the number and length of tracks are notable. The Racetrack's stones speckle the playa floor, predominantly in the southern portion. Historical accounts identify some stones around 100 m (300 ft) from shore, yet most of the stones are found relatively close to their respec
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