Turquoise Hot Spring Beyond Orange Mineral Terraces

A watercolor-style landscape looks across a wide, pale terrace of mineral crust toward a pool of turquoise water. In the foreground the ground is banded in rust, orange, cream and grey, and thin channels of runoff wind across it in bright yellow and red lines. Beyond the pool, a rounded reddish bluff topped with dark evergreens rises on the left, with steam drifting at its base. Hazy ridges fade into the distance on the right. A small group of figures and what look like horses stand far off on the flat crust, which makes the basin look very large. Soft clouds fill the pale blue sky, and the light is warm and quiet.

The title places the scene in the Lower Geyser Basin, part of Yellowstone National Park. The colours of hot spring runoff usually come from heat-loving microbes, which form mats in orange, yellow and brown in the cooler water, while the deep blue of the pool comes from clear, very hot water. Minerals dissolved in the water settle out as the pale crust seen here. The image is a chromolithograph made in 1874 after Thomas Moran. It suits a widescreen desktop monitor, where the long, flowing foreground lines can sit below icons without crowding them.