A tourist visiting Yellowstone National Park died this week after he slipped and fell into the hottest thermal area in the part, the Norris Geyser Basin. His body has not been recovered. According to the park website, the Basin regularly reaches temperatures of up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Colin Nathaniel Scott, 23, of Portland, Ore., had wandered about 225 yards away from the boardwalk with his sister when the incident occurred.
Could anyone survive a fall into one of the park’s scalding, acidic hot springs? Yellowstone has an abundance of both hot springs and geysers. The main difference between the two is that in hot springs, “water is allowed to circulate to the surface and move freely, giving off steam and heat. In geysers, constrictions keep the boiling water underground. Steam pushes water upward towards the surface, causing a drop in pressure and a subsequent eruption,” according to MapQuest‘s parks page.
But despite these differences, both hot springs and geysers can have devastating effects on the human body—16 people have died from thermal-related injuries in Yellowstone Park since 1890. Most of the hot springs in Yellowstone can reach temperatures over 150° F, and many of them are in the 185-205° F range (due to the elevation, water boils at about 198°F in Yellowstone).
Injuries can range from debilitating burns to death depending on how long the person spends in the water and how hot it is. Even if you do manage to escape the water, you can still die from your burns hours, days or even weeks later. The last recorded thermal-related death was in 2000, when a 20-year-old summer employee fell into a hot spring while walking through the park at night. She died 15 hours after being pulled from Cavern Spring, a 178°F pool about 10 feet deep. More recently, a father and son both suffered non-life threatening burns after they wandered away from the boardwalk and fell into a hot spring.
