Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Photo by Peter Stringer for Amazing America.
The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is the largest hot spring in the United States, and the third largest in the world, after Frying Pan Lake in New Zealand and Boiling Lake in Dominica. It is located in the Midway Geyser Basin.
Grand Prismatic Spring was noted by geologists working in the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871, and named by them for its striking coloration. Its colors match most of those seen in the rainbow dispersion of white light by an optical prism: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “Grand Prismatic Spring“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.