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Hot Springs At Yellowstone Changed Their Color Due To Tourist Activity

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-colors dept.

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."

8 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Lost in translation ... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 4, Funny

    tourists contaminated the pools with make-a-wish coins and other detritus.

    Translation: "quit peeing in the pools!"

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    1. Re: Lost in translation ... by khallow · · Score: 2

      News flash, the pools change color overtime time anyway. Birds drown in them because they think they are normal lakes, dirty sediment water runs off in to it and other animals fall in.

      And people dump all kinds of crap in those pools too. The problem isn't that humanity is evil, though obviously that is a seductive narrative for the occasion, but simply that there's so many people visiting.

      If you were to drop a bison in, it would quickly, over the course of a few days be rendered down (in the original sense of the word) to at most a few tens of kilograms of bone. Further, they aren't the smartest animals in the Park, but they're smart enough to avoid Grand Prismatic. So on the animal side you're left with things like hapless ducks who didn't get the memo.

      On the plant side, you basically have wind-blown leaves (wood is durable, but it doesn't grow in hot springs for some reason) which don't last either. The spring happens to be set back from the hillside behind it so you're not getting a lot of silt. There's not a lot of natural mass going into Grand Prismatic.

      On the other hand, if a hundred thousand tourists per year (of the many more visitors who actually walk by the hot spring) each toss a penny into the spring (which isn't hard to do since the boardwalk goes up to the edge of the spring), then you're adding 200 kg of copper and zinc to that spring every year. And those coins tend to stick around even in weakly acidic waters of Grand Prismatic. I think the National Park Service has been successful at keeping people from dumping a lot of junk in the spring, but it is a never ending battle. Evil humanity has been kept at bay, yay. But if they stopped doing it, human litter would probably plug up the spring (third largest in the world) in a few decades.

      A much smaller spring is far more susceptible to this sort of problem. The popular Morning Glory Pool has changed its colors over the years due to human litter (coins, beer cans, etc). And they're pretty sure it's human because they dredge up the debris in the pool every so often to keep it active (and there apparently is a noticeable difference before and after).

  2. Public land closures by pablo_max · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Public land closures by JackieBrown · · Score: 2

      Yes - this is very frustrating. I've been to caves that I used to be able to go further in. It's funny when the rangers states that you are in is as far as people have ever been allowed andyou can see the informational signs on the nice trail ahead of him

    2. Re:Public land closures by smooth+wombat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      but things like this are used more and more to justify land closures.

      If people wouldn't screw things up, or destroy parts of a park, or just not think, then this wouldn't be an issue, would it?

      To use a phrase, this is why we can't have nice things.

      --
      We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
    3. Re:Public land closures by khallow · · Score: 2

      I'm sure they believed they were defending freedom.

      I'm sure they a) didn't care and b) didn't think about it. The two go hand in hand.

      Because freedom's just another word for nothing left to abuse.

      You think freedom sucks for the environment? Try its absence for something even worse. Free people care about the environment far more than slaves.Classic example is the difference between the West and Communism during the Cold War. The Aral Sea is just about gone because way back when, some central planning group decided to turn a bunch of desert into farmland without considering the consequences. Bad stuff happens in the developed world too, but you can't be stopped from caring about it. And as a result, those sort of decisions have a lot more push back and don't go as far.

      The US-equivalent is the Salton Sea which was made by an epic mistake, the accidental redirecting of the entire Colorado River into Imperial Valley for a couple of years at the beginning of the 20th Century. Neither the US or Mexican governments (the flooding actually originated on the Mexican side of the border) contributed much to the effort of restoring the previous state. It took the regional railroad (which was greatly impaired by the flood waters to stop the flooding.

      Freedom kept the Imperial Valley from just being the Salton Sea. Lack of freedom damned the Aral Sea.

      It took one or two guys on 4wd offroad vehicles, after tearing down and shooting up the private property signs and fences, then doing donuts and running all over the site one day, to destroy all the work I'd done terracing and replanting the site, and turn much of it into gravel and gullies in the next rains.

      If a couple of off-roaders can set you back to square one, then you are doing it wrong. Nature is not all-enduring, but it can take a beating (such as the forest fire, which was much worse). I also see this sort of flawed thinking in environmental science fiction all the time where there is some fragile terraforming ecosystem that requires constant human attention. Bonus cliche points, if their animal companion/mascot looks on as they toil away desperately trying to save the gimpy tree for the future of their new world.

      My view is that this is not ecosystem restoration or the terraforming equivalent, but landscaping. Its private property and if you want to make it look pretty, that's fine with me. Off roaders in that situation were committing a variety of crimes in trespassing on the property and vandalizing it. Too bad you didn't catch them. But it would have taken more than that to derail a proper land restoration project. Sorry.

  3. Summary is a bit misleading by sandytaru · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."

    --
    Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
  4. Buffalo Chips by slacklinejoe · · Score: 2

    I've been to Yellowstone many times and yes, tourists can be horrible people. That said, you're talking about places like Prismatic Lake which, while fragile and beautiful, have a large population of resident American Bison (Buffalo) that lay in, and defecate in, these pools. The tourist trash I usually see is the occasional coin, flipflop (because idiot tourists), baseball hat (it's windy) and whatever paper blows in. Yes there's more, but compared to large amounts of biomass, I can't help but think the animal population has a larger impact on the bacterial mats.