In our travels around the world, we have found that some of the most beautiful places on earth are located in earth’s geothermal hotspots. In these places where the earth’s crust is thinnest, the water, steam and minerals that spew from beneath the ground create fantastic landscapes filled with lakes of brightly colored water, where vaporous white clouds hang above the landscape. Water filled cracks and tears in the surface of the land, cliffs and rugged chasms, caldera lakes and waterfalls add distinctive charm to these areas.
#1 Yellowstone National Park, United States of America
Yellowstone National Park is the most geothermally active place on earth. It is a place of extraordinary beauty, a natural wonderland. Established in 1872, Yellowstone is the world’s oldest national park.
Spanning nearly five thousand square kilometers, the park has more than ten thousand geothermal features and five hundred geysers, more than sixty percent of the geysers on earth. Yellowstone Lake is the largest mountain lake in North America. Bubbling mud pots, hot water pools and steam vents are scattered across the park. In the presence thermophile microbes, some of the pools are unlikely shades of blue, yellow and green. The upper geyser basin contains the biggest collection of colorful thermal pools anywhere on earth.
Three hundred and fifty waterfalls cascade down cliffs as steep as 94 metres. Over five thousand bison roam the park, the largest herd on public land, and the only herd in the United States to have lived continuously in the area since prehistory. Grey wolves, elk, grizzly bears and moose have made the forests and the slopes of the park their home.
With nearly one thousand five hundred kilometers of hiking trails the best way to experience Yellowstone is off the beaten track.
#2 Rotorua, New Zealand
Located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, in the heart of New Zealand’s North Island, Rotorua is nicknamed “Sulphur City”, due to the ever-present smell of sulphur dioxide that hangs around this area. Besides the thermal pools and geysers, the area has seventeen lakes. The biggest, the sixteen-kilometer Lake Rotorua is in a caldera formed thousands of years ago the magma chamber beneath the volcano collapsed.