| Summary: | T158 THE BRIMMING BASINS OF JUPITER TERRACE, MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS. We are standing before one of the faces of wonderful Jupiter Terrace, looking across some of the limpid pools of water upheld in their sumptuous basins of Nature's carving. These formations grow quite rapidly, several inches of travertine often being built up in a year by the deposits of calcium carbonate. In this respect the hot springs basins differ radically from the cones and basins of the geysers farther south in the Park, for the latter are built almost entirely of silica in the form of sinter, or geyserite, which deposits at the most one hundred times less rapidly than the travertine. One large terrace, well up the slope of Terrace Mountain, southwest from Jupiter, began building as lately as 1922. It is called the New Highland Terrace. Some of the springs, breaking out on slopes covered with timber, have killed the trees but preserved the dead trunks in the growing beds of travertine. many terraces exist on the different levels of this unique hill. Among the finest are Mound Terrace, Hymen Terrace, Cleopatra Terrace, and Minerva Terrace. Near the New Highland is Angel Terrace, perhaps the most pure and delicate in its structure of any. In other places are Narrow Gauge Terrace, Main Terrace, the White Elephant, and the Grottoes. Then there are many remarkable extinct hot spring fissures, such as The Devil's Kitchen, which may safely be entered, and the Stygian Cave, which emits carbonic-acid gas in dangerous quantities, causing in fact the death of many birds and small animals every year.
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