The Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park has erupted for the first time in over eight years, according to CNN.
The eruption lasted for about nine minutes, sending steaming hot water into the air at heights estimated at 200 to 300 feet in the air, Hank Heasler, a park geologist, said.
While Old Faithful, the more famous geyser in Yellowstone National Park, erupts on a regular schedule, every hour-and-a-half, Steamboat doesn't follow any schedule, erupting at random.
The geyser has been known to go as long as 50 years without an eruption. In 1929, the geyser erupted 29 times in that year alone, setting a record. The most recent blast previously occurred in 2005.
Steamboat is one among over 500 geysers at Yellowstone National Park, which boasts the largest collection of hydrothermal features in the world. It's located in a popular viewing area that is known as the Norris Geyser Basin.
"We estimate this eruption was about 200 to 300 feet high, and then it just steamed for about 24 hours," Dan Hottle, a spokesman for Yellowstone, said.
The eruption, which occurred at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, drew dozens of excited onlookers, according to Robb Long, a freelance photographer who was visiting the park with his fiancé and her family from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
"It was an amazing experience," Long said. "This thing sounded like a locomotive.
"Everybody was frantic, taking pictures, people were running down there trying to get to it before it went away, and park rangers were running around trying to gather up people so they didn't get too close," Long continued.
The geysers in Yellowstone National Park are fueled by cold water that feeds into a natural underground plumbing network, where the park's volcano forces chemical-laden water to the surface with heat, causing the periodic eruptions, Heasler said.
The first accounts of the geysers eruptions are from first-hand observations with the first recorded observation in 1878. Since 2005, electronic monitors have tracked the geyser.
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