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Champagne Pool!

Did you guess where the Champagne Pool is located? If you said New Zealand, you would be 100% right!

Now don’t get too excited about its content; it is named for its champagne-like bubbles rather than for the drink itself. However, this makes it quite special: there are colorful boiling water and mud pools that burble and belch. The excess of its water even goes to fill another pool called Artist’s Palette whose color is yellow due to sulfur deposits. Incredible!

Champagne Pool is a hot spring located within the Waiotapu geothermal area on the North Island of New Zealand. Its name comes from carbon dioxide gas that is constantly coming out, which causes bubbling similar to those occurring in a glass of champagne. The pool displays brilliant colors derived from minerals and silicates along with silicate structures around the rim teeming with microbial life.

Created by an eruption about 900 years ago, this hydrothermal feature has a crater 62 m deep and 65 m across the top. Carbonated waters which contain much CO2 come up through cracks and holes to form bubbles near the surface where temperature reaches 74ºC (165 ºF). Orange silica colloids rich in antimony form during cooling at margins of basin, but they also have solidifying properties when hardened as rock. Mercury, thallium, gold, and silver are also deposited in rocks.

It was named one of “20 Most Surreal Places in the World”, including Champagne Pool and its environment

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Published
25 July 2024
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