Geyser Eruptions

The Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park has been the subject of careful eruption timing since the 1870s. The historical record shows a bimodal pattern: short eruptions tend to follow shorter wait times, while longer eruptions are followed by considerably longer waits. The dataset has become a standard teaching example in introductory statistics for kernel density estimation, mixture modeling, and the dangers of summarizing bimodal distributions with a single mean.

The visualization uses a synthetic scatter plot modeled on the familiar Old Faithful pattern, with eruption duration on one axis and waiting time until the next eruption on the other. The simulated points form two groups: shorter eruptions around two minutes followed by shorter waits, and longer eruptions around four minutes followed by longer waits. The clear separation between clusters shows why a single mean duration or mean wait time would be misleading.