One of the most famous national parks is the Yellowstone, offering a huge diversity of
plant and animal lives for visitors to enjoy!
However, even though the park delights millions of visitors annually, there is a
lot yet to be known about Yellowstone.
This is why scientists keep making discoveries about
this magnificent park!
Some of the discoveries are terrifying, like the ones
we bring you in this video!
Yellowstone National Park is the oldest, one of the largest, and probably the best-known
national park in the United States.
It is situated principally in northwestern Wyoming and
partly in southern Montana and eastern Idaho.
It includes the greatest concentration of hydrothermal features in the world.
The park was established on March 1, 1872, as the country's first national park.
It is also generally considered to have been the
first national park in the world.
However, some naturalists and others have argued that
evidence indicates that the creation of Yellowstone was predated by the creation of
Bogd Khan Mountain National Park in Mongolia, which may date from as early as
1778!
Yellowstone became a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1976 and a World Heritage site
in 1978.
The park, which forms a square-like rectangle with an irregular eastern side, is
63 miles or 101 km from north to south and 54 miles or 87 km from east to west at its
widest point and covers an area of 3,472 square miles or 8,992 square km.
Yellowstone's principal attractions are hydrothermal features, which constitute roughly
half of all those known in the world.
The region's deeply fractured crust allows groundwater to seep down to where it makes
contact with the magma.
The superheated and mineral-rich water then returns to the
surface as steam vents, fumaroles, colorful hot pools, mud cauldrons, paint pots, hot
springs and terraces, hot rivers, and geysers.
It is thought that the constant stream of minor tremors that shake the region act to
keep open the numerous cracks and fissures in the
ground that might otherwise become clogged with minerals precipitating out of
the hot water as it cools.
Of the park's more than 300 geysers, many erupt to heights of
100 feet or 30 meters or more!
Old Faithful, in west-central Yellowstone, the most famous
geyser in the park, erupts fairly regularly, roughly every 90 minutes.
Some 1,350 species of flowering plants, with roughly 1,150 of them native, have been
identified in Yellowstone.
About four-fifths of the park's area is forested, and the vast
majority of the tree growth consists of lodgepole pines.
Animal life in Yellowstone is typical of the Rocky Mountain West.
The park boasts the greatest assemblage of mammals, more than
five dozen species, in the United States, outside of Alaska.
Bison or buffalo, the largest of the mammals, were brought back from
near extinction.
Let's start our list of Yellowstone discoveries with one that is really scary; a newly
discovered eruption in the park is one of the top 5 eruptions of all time!
Below the picturesque geysers and rainbow-tinted hot springs of Yellowstone National
Park lurks one of the most destructive volcanoes on Earth.
The gargantuan Yellowstone hotspot, also known as the Yellowstone supervolcano,
has erupted at least ten times over the past 16 million years, permanently
altering the geography of North America!
However, its effects were not limited to North America, as it periodically warped Earth's
climate, throwing flakes of airborne ash to every corner of the world!
According to the scientists, the new discovery rewrites the hotspot's ancient history.
The largest, most cataclysmic of these eruptions are called supereruptions.
These Earth-shuddering blasts measure 8 or higher
on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, VEI, which measures a volcano's relative explosivity
by the height of its ash column and the volume of its leftover lava.
For context, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens measured
5 on the VEI.
However, because the scale is logarithmic, a level-8 supereruption is
about 1,000 times more explosive than that!
The second eruption, called the Grey's Landing supereruption, occurred 8.72 million
years ago and was colossal!
This eruption covered roughly 8,900 square miles or
23,000 square km of what is now southern Idaho and northern Nevada, making it the
single largest eruption of the Yellowstone hotspot ever detected!
Meanwhile, the discovery gets even more frightening when you go below the ground at
the Yellowstone national park!
Buried under your feet is a gargantuan magma reservoir
containing hot, sponge-like rock and some molten rock that dwarfs a previously known
magma chamber.
The findings revealed the chamber holds enough scalding hot magma
to fill the Grand Canyon over 11 times!
Scientists discovered the chamber while mapping the underground plumbing system
below the supervolcano.
Hsin-Hua Huang, the study author and seismologist at the
University of Utah said, for the first time, scientists have imaged the continuous volcanic
plumbing system under Yellowstone.
That includes the upper crustal magma chamber we have seen previously, plus a lower crustal
magma reservoir that has never been imaged before and that connects the upper
chamber to the Yellowstone hotspot plume below.
The discovery is what Geophysicist Peter Cervelli describes as the "missing link"
between the plume and magma chamber.
If an eruption was to happen, the giant magma chamber could intensify the event,
leading to more destruction and reaching more distant parts of the planet!
Luckily, you don't have to worry because the chances of
an incident occurring are 1 in 700,000!
Now, did you know a key ingredient in coronavirus tests comes from Yellowstone's
lakes?
The pandemic has changed how we do everything altogether.
However, the Yellowstone has played a huge role in fighting
the virus!
It all started when Microbiologist Thomas Brock was tramping through
Yellowstone in the 1960s and stumbled upon a species of bacteria that would
transform medical science!
Brock was investigating the tiny life-forms that manage to eke out a living in the
superheated waters of the park's thermal pools.
There, he and a student found golden mats of stringy growth in Yellowstone's Mushroom
Spring containing a microbe that produces unusual heat-resistant enzymes.
Today, those enzymes are a key component in polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a
method used widely in labs worldwide to study small samples of genetic material by
making millions of copies.
This technique, which would have been impossible without
the discovery of heat-resistant bacteria more than half a century ago, is now being used
to boost the signal of viruses in most of the available tests for COVID-19!
As the novel coronavirus sweeps worldwide, testing has become the crux of tracking the
pandemic's advance.
While authorities were slow in making COVID-19 tests widely
available, the PCR process that is the vital backbone of the test is relatively simple
and quick, thanks to a cluster of bacteria thriving
in the thermal pools of Yellowstone!
In the 1980s, American biochemist Kary Mullis developed a technique to mimic the way
a cell naturally copies its DNA to grow and divide.
A set of primers, or short segments of DNA, mark the regions targeted for copying.
An enzyme known as DNA polymerase then assembles the basic building blocks of
DNA into the desired sequence.
The DNA has to be heated and then cooled in a cycle, again and again, each time
roughly doubling the number of genetic copies.
But in early experiments, the high temperatures of each cycle damaged the DNA
polymerase needed to make those copies.
Mullis realized that an enzyme from the Yellowstone bacteria could survive the heating
and cooling cycles and speed up the process.
Over the years, these enzymes have allowed scientists to automate the DNA-copying
process.
Now, researchers can produce hundreds of millions of genetic copies
in hours!
The COVID-19 test uses this same process—but with a few additional steps.
The genetic material of the novel coronavirus
is RNA rather than DNA, which is similar but encodes its genetic instructions with different
building blocks in just a single strand.
The RNA of the virus is converted to DNA first.
The test also includes a fluorescent tag highlighting copies of the virus's genetic
material in a nasal swab.
The more copies that are made with PCR, the brighter the sample!
The next discovery in the Yellowstone national park is literally out of this world!
It can actually help in the search for life on Mars!
Researchers say a bizarre group of microbes found living inside rocks in an inhospitable
geothermal environment at Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park could provide
tantalizing new clues about ancient life on Earth and help steer the hunt for evidence
of life on Mars.
University of Colorado at Boulder, CU-Boulder, scientists Jeffrey Walker, John Spear,
and Norman Pace reported their findings in research funded by the National Science
Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology and NASA.
The CU-Boulder research team reported that the microbes were discovered in the pores
of rocks in a highly acidic environment with high concentrations of metals and silicates
at roughly 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Yellowstone's Norris Geyser Basin.
The new study shows that the microbe communities are subject
to fossilization and have the potential to become preserved in the geologic record.
Scientists believe similar geothermal environments may once have existed on Mars,
where astrobiologists have intensified the search for past and present life forms in
recent years.
This is the first description of these microbial communities, which may be a good
diagnostic indicator of past life on Mars because of their potential for fossil preservation.
The prevalence of this type of microbial life in Yellowstone means that Martian rocks
associated with former hydrothermal systems may be the best hope for finding evidence
of past life there.
Located about 20 miles northwest of Yellowstone Lake, Norris Geyser Basin is
considered the hottest and most-active geyser basin in Yellowstone and perhaps the
world.
It also is highly acidic, according to the researchers.
The pores in the rocks where these creatures live have a pH value
of one, which dissolves nails!
It is another example that life can be robust in an environment
most humans view as inhospitable!
Let's hear what you like best about the Yellowstone national park in the comment
section below!