geysers in the world

[maro21]

I don’t know where I can write about it, but haven’t found a better place on the forum.

I was curious where geysers are located in the world, so I made an overpass turbo query.
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/PfA (540 geysers)

Wikipedia says geysers are common mainly on Iceland, USA, Kamchatka, meanwhile on OSM we have them mostly on deserts, Middle East and Europe. I’m not good at hydrogeology but something’s not right here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_geyser_distribution.gif
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geysers

@Wikipedia

Geysers are quite a rare phenomenon, requiring a combination of specific geological and climatic conditions. There are six places in the world where there are larger accumulations of geysers:

• Wyoming, USA,
• Iceland,
• North Island, New Zealand,
• Kamchatka, Russia,
• El Tatio, Chile,
• Alaska, USA.

on OSM:
Alaska - none
Kamchatka - none
Iceland - only one

Looks like we have a lot of fake geysers on OSM, see for example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6200232286

[escada]

There is also naturual=geothermal_area
Following the OverpassTurbo link on the page shows 3 areas in the South-West of Iceland

And natural=hot_spring has a little over 2300 mapped items, around 290 of them in Iceland.

[kucai]

maybe they intended to tag them as springs, instead of geysers.