Inside the guts of a geyser

I never thought I would live to see the day when enterprising researchers put a camera down the conduit of a geyser.  It always seemed like a good idea to me.  So it has been done, as the video below shows, and they learned that the inner plumbing of a geyser is more complicated (and in a sense, less complicated too) than what had been thought before.

More complicated in the sense that there appear to be little piles of rubble all around, sort of like a little cave, and many of these little piles of rubble act as boiling points, just like the little bubble pebbles that are put in beakers in the chem lab to prevent explosive BIG bubbles of scalding hot acid.  (That's a good thing to avoid.)  Less complicated in the sense that the plumbing had been envisioned more as a complex series of tubes.  This is just basically a cave flooded with hot boiling water.

This also explains to some extent why geysers can be off and on.  Just a small shift in the location of a couple of boulder blocks might totally change the generation of the right size and number of bubbles to cause an eruption.  And then the geyser might not erupt for years until another shift gets the bubble pattern right again.  Also, an area of the underwater cavern might get cut off or restricted by a rock pile shift.

Anyway, cool to watch.  This was filmed at the Valley of the Geysers in Kamchatka.