Hi, I'm Matthew Stott and I am a microbiologist that works at GNS Science
and I study microorganisms that grow in geothermal environments.
You have microorganisms that that growth normal temperatures, microorganisms, bacteria,
love growing in high temperatures as well. They adapt to all kinds of things.
Environments with high acidity and toxic concentrations of metals, even highly
radioactive areas. Microorganisms can adapt to these environments and
I guess there's a general term for micro organisms that grow in these
environments that are not particularly conducive to humans and that is extremophiles.
As you can see in the water here we have these magical looking formations
that represent where the water's moving. So microorganisms are also associated with these systems.
So what happens is the bacteria forms on the surface
and then the silica encrusts a layer over the top of the bacteria
and the bacteria come on the surface again and so you form these
long feather like structures.
So we've walked up the stream just a little bit further and the water's getting hotter
as you can tell by the steam that's floating around.
and if you have a look in the in the water body here you'll see there's a variety of colours
including white, pinks, oranges and some green.
And what that usually represents is different temperatures of the water.
So where the water's green we have photosynthetic bugs and the water is slightly cooler, about 50 degrees.
As the temperature increases the photosynthetic microorganisms can't grow anymore
and so you end up with some pink coloured microorganisms
and they grow in around about 60 to 70 degrees.
As the temperature increases even further you start getting in whites and then some greys
where there's very little microorganisms.
So this is actually a shelf of silica here and you would certainly wouldn't walk onto it
because its only a layer about two or three centimeters thick.
If you do a cross section of this silica under an electron microscope
it's just covered - it looks like a honeycomb - there's that many bugs in the silica.
There are two ways in which we study hot springs
and the micro organisms that grow within these hot springs
the first is to extract DNA from the environment and then we use that DNA
to identify the microorganisms, or we take water from the environment
and we inoculate them into a bottle or a vessel in the lab and we can grow the microorganisms in the lab.
I have a bottle here that was used to grow microorganisms
and you can see it's a lovely yellow colour.
If have a look at that this bottle here and then look at the terraces over the back of my shoulder
you can see that they are almost the same color. So it's a fairly reasonable bet
to say that the microorganisms growing within this bottle are also the ones
that make this lovely yellow color here on the terrace.
so here we are at the source of the geothermal system at Wairakei Terraces.
The water is coming out of the ground at around 104 degrees. This pool is nice and warm, a balmy 95 degrees,
and there's already microorganisms growing within this hot spring.
The formation you see on the edge of the surface here is where water loaded full of silica
splashes onto the rocks and then evaporates and you're left with a little silica layer.
They form these like fingers coming out of the ground.
They're called sinter, or some people call them land coral.
Where do these microorganisms come from? This hot spring is just under a hundred degrees celsius
and yet microorganisms readily flourish in this environment. So it begs the question:
"Are these microorganisms representative of what was the primordial soup three billion years ago?"
Perhaps this could be what the environment looked like at that time.