Cold Splinters

The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is the largest hot spring in the United States, and the third largest in the world. It is approximately 70 feet in diameter and over 121 feet deep. The spring discharges an estimated 560 US gallons of 160 °F (70 °C) water per minute.

The vivid colors in Grand Prismatic are the result of pigmented bacteria in the microbial mats that grow around the edges of the mineral-rich water. The bacteria produce colors ranging from green to red; the amount of color in the microbial mats depends on the ratio of chlorophyll to carotenoids and on the temperature of the water that favors one bacterium over another. In the summer, the mats tend to be orange and red, whereas in the winter the mats are usually dark green. The center of the pool is sterile due to extreme heat.

Scientists have discovered that by recording the sounds that bark beetles make, tweaking them, and then blasting the sounds back at the beetles, they can disrupt mating, tunneling, and reproduction, thus creating a virtual wall around the effected areas of the west.

The scientists have developed a device that would be drilled into the outer layer of the lodgepole pines and other trees that beetles favor, pumping the sound waves under bark. Costing about $100 a tree, it’s cheaper, less environmentally disruptive, and far more effective than other methods.

Read more over at The Adventure Life.

NYT:

About 50,000 years ago, a 150-foot lump of iron and nickel, a renegade from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sliced through the sky out of the northeast at seven miles per second. When it hit it tore up the landscape in an instant, excavating several hundred million tons of dirt and rock and flipping layers of sandstone like pancakes.

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Nat Geo

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