Hot Springs At Yellowstone Changed Their Color Due To Tourist Activity

An anonymous reader writes Researchers say that the different colors of the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park are caused by human contamination. From the article: "Researchers at Montana State University and Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany have created a simple mathematical model based on optical measurements that explains the stunning colors of Yellowstone National Park's hot springs and can visually recreate how they appeared years ago, before decades of tourists contaminated the pools with make-a-wish coins and other detritus. If Yellowstone National Park is a geothermal wonderland, Grand Prismatic Spring and its neighbors are the ebullient envoys, steaming in front of the camera and gracing the Internet with their ethereal beauty. While the basic physical phenomena that render these colorful delights have long been scientifically understood—they arise because of a complicated interplay of underwater vents and lawns of bacteria—no mathematical model existed that showed empirically how the physical and chemical variables of a pool relate to their optical factors and coalesce in the unique, stunning fashion that they do."

Comments

Public land closures

[pablo_max]

It may not seem like a big deal, but things like this are used more and more to justify land closures.
For what ever reason, the government has seen fit in the last 2 decades to make more and more public lands off limits to the public. Normally under the umbrella of "protecting" the lands or the public.

Summary is a bit misleading

[sandytaru]

I RTFA. These pools have ALWAYS been colorful. That's partially why Yellowstone was made into a national park, after all. It's the composition of colors that has changed in the last century, due to a slightly lower temperature and thus a slightly different bacterial makeup. The summary sort of implies that it was pollution that made each pool colorful to begin with, which isn't the case. Instead of "Researchers say that the different colors of the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park are caused by human contamination" it would be more accurate to say: "Researchers have done a simulation that shows how human activity may have altered the colors in several hot springs at Yellowstone."