Mapping US Hot Springs onto the Heat Rising Through the Ground

A web project plots every hot spring in its database over a map of terrestrial heat flow, drawn from Stanford’s Thermal Earth Model. The pattern is stark: springs cluster in the American West, where a stretched, fault-riddled crust pushes hot rock close to the surface and lets groundwater circulate down and return heated. The East, sitting well below the national heat-flow average of about 65 milliwatts per square meter, has only scattered springs fed by water that descends unusually deep before resurfacing.

The site ranks springs two ways — by the heat flow beneath them and by measured water temperature — and notes that many of the hottest, like Nevada’s Steamboat Springs and California’s Geysers, are geysers or boiling pools nobody can actually soak in. It layers in Landsat 8/9 thermal satellite imagery, which on clear winter days shows major geothermal fields glowing against frozen terrain, paired with ground-level photos and aerial views.

The underlying dataset is freely reusable under CC BY 4.0 and downloadable as a CSV, combining the Stanford model with public-domain USGS map and imagery sources. It’s a clean example of stitching open scientific data and public satellite feeds into an accessible interactive explainer.