1.
Grand Prismatic Spring
–
It is located in the Midway Geyser Basin. Grand Prismatic Spring was noted by geologists working in the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871 and its colors match the rainbow dispersion of white light by an optical prism, red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. The first records of the spring are from early European explorers and surveyors. In 1839, a group of fur trappers from the American Fur Company crossed the Midway Geyser Basin and made note of a lake, most likely the Grand Prismatic Spring. In 1870 the Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition visited the spring, noting a 50-foot geyser nearby, the vivid colors in the spring are the result of microbial mats around the edges of the mineral-rich water. The mats produce colors ranging from green to red, the amount of color in the microbial mats depends on the ratio of chlorophyll to carotenoids, 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 due to extreme heat. The deep blue color of the water in the center of the results from the scattering of blue light by particles suspended in the water. This effect is visible in the center of the spring due to the lack of archaea that live in the center. The spring is approximately 370 feet in diameter and is 160 feet deep, the spring discharges an estimated 560 US gallons of 160 °F water per minute. Media related to Grand Prismatic Spring at Wikimedia Commons
2.
Yellowstone National Park
–
Yellowstone National Park is a national park located in the U. S. states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. It was established by the U. S. Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1,1872. Yellowstone was the first National Park in the U. S. and is widely held to be the first national park in the world. The park is known for its wildlife and its many features, especially Old Faithful Geyser. It has many types of ecosystems, but the subalpine forest is the most abundant and it is part of the South Central Rockies forests ecoregion. Native Americans have lived in the Yellowstone region for at least 11,000 years, aside from visits by mountain men during the early-to-mid-19th century, organized exploration did not begin until the late 1860s. Management and control of the park fell under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior. However, the U. S. Army was subsequently commissioned to oversee management of Yellowstone for a 30-year period between 1886 and 1916, in 1917, administration of the park was transferred to the National Park Service, which had been created the previous year. Hundreds of structures have been built and are protected for their architectural and historical significance, Yellowstone National Park spans an area of 3,468.4 square miles, comprising lakes, canyons, rivers and mountain ranges. Yellowstone Lake is one of the largest high-elevation lakes in North America and is centered over the Yellowstone Caldera, the caldera is considered an active volcano. It has erupted with tremendous force several times in the last two million years, half of the worlds geothermal features are in Yellowstone, fueled by this ongoing volcanism. Lava flows and rocks from volcanic eruptions cover most of the area of Yellowstone. The park is the centerpiece of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the largest remaining nearly-intact ecosystem in the Earths northern temperate zone, hundreds of species of mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles have been documented, including several that are either endangered or threatened. The vast forests and grasslands also include species of plants. Yellowstone Park is the largest and most famous location in the Continental United States. Grizzly bears, wolves, and free-ranging herds of bison and elk live in the park, the Yellowstone Park bison herd is the oldest and largest public bison herd in the United States. Forest fires occur in the each year, in the large forest fires of 1988. Yellowstone has numerous opportunities, including hiking, camping, boating, fishing and sightseeing
3.
Extremophile
–
An extremophile is an organism that thrives in physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to most life on Earth. In contrast, organisms that live in moderate environments may be termed mesophiles or neutrophiles. Some scientists even concluded that life may have begun on Earth in hydrothermal vents far under the oceans surface. According to astrophysicist Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson, There are viable bacterial spores that have found that are 40 million years old on Earth—and we know theyre very hardened to radiation. On 6 February 2013, scientists reported that bacteria were found living in the cold, on 17 March 2013, researchers reported data that suggested microbial life forms thrive in the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on the Earth. Other researchers reported related studies that microbes thrive inside rocks up to 1900 feet below the sea floor under 8500 feet of ocean off the coast of the northwestern United States. According to one of the researchers, You can find microbes everywhere—theyre extremely adaptable to conditions, the domain Archaea contains renowned examples, but extremophiles are present in numerous and diverse genetic lineages of bacteria and archaeans. Furthermore, it is erroneous to use the term extremophile to encompass all archaeans, neither are all extremophiles unicellular, protostome animals found in similar environments include the Pompeii worm, the psychrophilic Grylloblattidae and Antarctic krill. Their chances of dying increase the longer they are exposed to the extreme environment, There are many classes of extremophiles that range all around the globe, each corresponding to the way its environmental niche differs from mesophilic conditions. Many extremophiles fall under multiple categories and are classified as polyextremophiles, for example, organisms living inside hot rocks deep under Earths surface are thermophilic and barophilic such as Thermococcus barophilus. A polyextremophile living at the summit of a mountain in the Atacama Desert might be a radioresistant xerophile, a psychrophile, polyextremophiles are well known for their ability to tolerate both high and low pH levels. Two sub-types exist, facultative anaerobe and obligate anaerobe, in it, microbial ecologists, astronomers, planetary scientists, geochemists, philosophers, and explorers cooperate constructively to guide the search for life on other planets. Astrobiologists are particularly interested in studying extremophiles, as many organisms of this type are capable of surviving in environments similar to known to exist on other planets. For example, Mars may have regions in its deep subsurface permafrost that could harbor endolith communities, the subsurface water ocean of Jupiters moon Europa may harbor life, especially at hypothesized hydrothermal vents at the ocean floor. Recent research carried out on extremophiles in Japan involved a variety of bacteria including Escherichia coli, the bacteria were cultivated while being rotated in an ultracentrifuge at high speeds corresponding to 403,627 g. Analysis showed that the size of prokaryotic cells is essential for successful growth under hypergravity. The research has implications on the feasibility of panspermia, on 19 May 2014, scientists announced that numerous microbes, like Tersicoccus phoenicis, may be resistant to methods usually used in spacecraft assembly clean rooms. Its not currently known if such resistant microbes could have withstood space travel and are present on the Curiosity rover now on the planet Mars, on 20 August 2014, scientists confirmed the existence of microorganisms living half a mile below the ice of Antarctica
4.
Archaea
–
The Archaea constitute a domain and kingdom of single-celled microorganisms. These microbes are prokaryotes, meaning that they have no cell nucleus or any other membrane-bound organelles in their cells, Archaea were initially classified as bacteria, receiving the name archaebacteria, but this classification is outdated. Archaeal cells have unique properties separating them from the two domains of life, Bacteria and Eukaryota. The Archaea are further divided into multiple recognized phyla, classification is difficult because the majority have not been isolated in the laboratory and have only been detected by analysis of their nucleic acids in samples from their environment. Archaea and bacteria are generally similar in size and shape, although a few archaea have very strange shapes, such as the flat, other aspects of archaeal biochemistry are unique, such as their reliance on ether lipids in their cell membranes, including archaeols. Archaea use more energy sources than eukaryotes, these range from organic compounds, such as sugars, to ammonia, metal ions or even hydrogen gas. Salt-tolerant archaea use sunlight as a source, and other species of archaea fix carbon, however, unlike plants and cyanobacteria. Archaea reproduce asexually by fission, fragmentation, or budding, unlike bacteria and eukaryotes. They are also found in the colon, oral cavity. Archaea are particularly numerous in the oceans, and the archaea in plankton may be one of the most abundant groups of organisms on the planet, Archaea are a major part of Earths life and may play roles in both the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle. No clear examples of archaeal pathogens or parasites are known, one example is the methanogens that inhabit human and ruminant guts, where their vast numbers aid digestion. Methanogens are also used in production and sewage treatment, and enzymes from extremophile archaea that can endure high temperatures. For much of the 20th century, prokaryotes were regarded as a group of organisms and classified based on their biochemistry, morphology. For example, microbiologists tried to classify based on the structures of their cell walls, their shapes. In 1965, Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling proposed instead using the sequences of the genes in different prokaryotes to work out how they are related to each other and this approach, known as phylogenetics, is the main method used today. Archaea were first classified as a group of prokaryotes in 1977 by Carl Woese. These two groups were named the Archaebacteria and Eubacteria and treated as kingdoms or subkingdoms, which Woese. Woese argued that group of prokaryotes is a fundamentally different sort of life
5.
Bacteria
–
Bacteria constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a number of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods, Bacteria were among the first life forms to appear on Earth, and are present in most of its habitats. Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, Bacteria also live in symbiotic and parasitic relationships with plants and animals. Most bacteria have not been characterised, and only half of the bacterial phyla have species that can be grown in the laboratory. The study of bacteria is known as bacteriology, a branch of microbiology, There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water. There are approximately 5×1030 bacteria on Earth, forming a biomass which exceeds that of all plants, Bacteria are vital in many stages of the nutrient cycle by recycling nutrients such as the fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere. The nutrient cycle includes the decomposition of bodies and bacteria are responsible for the putrefaction stage in this process. In March 2013, data reported by researchers in October 2012, was published and it was suggested that bacteria thrive in the Mariana Trench, which with a depth of up to 11 kilometres is the deepest known part of the oceans. Other researchers reported related studies that microbes thrive inside rocks up to 580 metres below the sea floor under 2.6 kilometres of ocean off the coast of the northwestern United States. According to one of the researchers, You can find microbes everywhere—theyre extremely adaptable to conditions, the vast majority of the bacteria in the body are rendered harmless by the protective effects of the immune system, though many are beneficial particularly in the gut flora. However several species of bacteria are pathogenic and cause diseases, including cholera, syphilis, anthrax, leprosy. The most common fatal diseases are respiratory infections, with tuberculosis alone killing about 2 million people per year. In developed countries, antibiotics are used to treat infections and are also used in farming, making antibiotic resistance a growing problem. Once regarded as constituting the class Schizomycetes, bacteria are now classified as prokaryotes. Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do not contain a nucleus and these evolutionary domains are called Bacteria and Archaea. The ancestors of modern bacteria were unicellular microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear on Earth, for about 3 billion years, most organisms were microscopic, and bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms of life. In 2008, fossils of macroorganisms were discovered and named as the Francevillian biota, however, gene sequences can be used to reconstruct the bacterial phylogeny, and these studies indicate that bacteria diverged first from the archaeal/eukaryotic lineage. Bacteria were also involved in the second great evolutionary divergence, that of the archaea, here, eukaryotes resulted from the entering of ancient bacteria into endosymbiotic associations with the ancestors of eukaryotic cells, which were themselves possibly related to the Archaea
6.
Geothermal gradient
–
Geothermal gradient is the rate of increasing temperature with respect to increasing depth in the Earths interior. Away from tectonic plate boundaries, it is about 25 °C per km of depth near the surface in most of the world, strictly speaking, geo-thermal necessarily refers to the Earth but the concept may be applied to other planets. A line tracing the gradient through the body is called a geotherm on Earth. On the Moon it is called a selenotherm, the Earths internal heat comes from a combination of residual heat from planetary accretion, heat produced through radioactive decay, and possibly heat from other sources. The major heat-producing isotopes in the Earth are potassium-40, uranium-238, uranium-235, at the center of the planet, the temperature may be up to 7,000 K and the pressure could reach 360 GPa. Temperature within the Earth increases with depth, the heat content of the Earth is 1031 joules. Much of the heat is created by decay of radioactive elements. An estimated 45 to 90 percent of the heat escaping from the Earth originates from decay of elements mainly located in the mantle. Heat of impact and compression released during the formation of the Earth by accretion of in-falling meteorites. Heat released as abundant heavy metals descended to the Earths core, latent heat released as the liquid outer core crystallizes at the inner core boundary. Heat may be generated by tidal force on the Earth as it rotates, since rock cannot flow as readily as water it compresses and distorts, in Earths continental crust, the decay of natural radioactive isotopes has had significant involvement in the origin of geothermal heat. The continental crust is abundant in lower density minerals but also contains significant concentrations of heavier lithophilic minerals such as uranium, because of this, it holds the largest global reservoir of radioactive elements found in the Earth. Especially in layers closer to Earths surface, naturally occurring isotopes are enriched in the granite and these high levels of radioactive elements are largely excluded from the Earths mantle due to their inability to substitute in mantle minerals and consequent enrichment in partial melts. The mantle is made up of high density minerals with high contents of atoms that have relatively small atomic radii such as magnesium, titanium. Heat flows constantly from its sources within the Earth to the surface, total heat loss from the Earth is estimated at 44.2 TW. Mean heat flow is 65 mW/m2 over continental crust and 101 mW/m2 over oceanic crust and this is 0.087 watt/square meter on average, but is much more concentrated in areas where thermal energy is transported toward the crust by convection such as along mid-ocean ridges and mantle plumes. The Earths crust effectively acts as an insulating blanket which must be pierced by fluid conduits in order to release the heat underneath. More of the heat in the Earth is lost through plate tectonics, the final major mode of heat loss is by conduction through the lithosphere, the majority of which occurs in the oceans due to the crust there being much thinner and younger than under the continents
7.
Earth
–
Earth, otherwise known as the World, or the Globe, is the third planet from the Sun and the only object in the Universe known to harbor life. It is the densest planet in the Solar System and the largest of the four terrestrial planets, according to radiometric dating and other sources of evidence, Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago. Earths gravity interacts with objects in space, especially the Sun. During one orbit around the Sun, Earth rotates about its axis over 365 times, thus, Earths axis of rotation is tilted, producing seasonal variations on the planets surface. The gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon causes ocean tides, stabilizes the Earths orientation on its axis, Earths lithosphere is divided into several rigid tectonic plates that migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. About 71% of Earths surface is covered with water, mostly by its oceans, the remaining 29% is land consisting of continents and islands that together have many lakes, rivers and other sources of water that contribute to the hydrosphere. The majority of Earths polar regions are covered in ice, including the Antarctic ice sheet, Earths interior remains active with a solid iron inner core, a liquid outer core that generates the Earths magnetic field, and a convecting mantle that drives plate tectonics. Within the first billion years of Earths history, life appeared in the oceans and began to affect the Earths atmosphere and surface, some geological evidence indicates that life may have arisen as much as 4.1 billion years ago. Since then, the combination of Earths distance from the Sun, physical properties, in the history of the Earth, biodiversity has gone through long periods of expansion, occasionally punctuated by mass extinction events. Over 99% of all species that lived on Earth are extinct. Estimates of the number of species on Earth today vary widely, over 7.4 billion humans live on Earth and depend on its biosphere and minerals for their survival. Humans have developed diverse societies and cultures, politically, the world has about 200 sovereign states, the modern English word Earth developed from a wide variety of Middle English forms, which derived from an Old English noun most often spelled eorðe. It has cognates in every Germanic language, and their proto-Germanic root has been reconstructed as *erþō, originally, earth was written in lowercase, and from early Middle English, its definite sense as the globe was expressed as the earth. By early Modern English, many nouns were capitalized, and the became the Earth. More recently, the name is simply given as Earth. House styles now vary, Oxford spelling recognizes the lowercase form as the most common, another convention capitalizes Earth when appearing as a name but writes it in lowercase when preceded by the. It almost always appears in lowercase in colloquial expressions such as what on earth are you doing, the oldest material found in the Solar System is dated to 4. 5672±0.0006 billion years ago. By 4. 54±0.04 Gya the primordial Earth had formed, the formation and evolution of Solar System bodies occurred along with the Sun
8.
Deep sea
–
The deep sea or deep layer is the lowest layer in the ocean, existing below the thermocline and above the seabed, at a depth of 1000 fathoms or more. Little or no light penetrates this part of the ocean, for this reason, scientists once assumed that life would be sparse in the deep ocean, but virtually every probe has revealed that, on the contrary, life is abundant in the deep ocean. From the time of Pliny until the nineteenth century. humans believed there was no life in the deep. It took an expedition in the ship Challenger between 1872 and 1876 to prove Pliny wrong, its deep-sea dredges and trawls brought up living things from all depths that could be reached. Yet even in the century scientists continued to imagine that life at great depth was insubstantial. The eternal dark, the almost inconceivable pressure, and the cold that exist below one thousand meters were, they thought, so forbidding as to have all. The reverse is in fact true, lies the largest habitat on earth. In 1960, the Bathyscaphe Trieste descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench near Guam, at 10,911 m, if Mount Everest were submerged there, its peak would be more than a mile beneath the surface. The Trieste was retired, and for a while the Japanese remote-operated vehicle Kaikō was the vessel capable of reaching this depth. It was lost at sea in 2003, in May and June 2009, the hybrid-ROV Nereus returned to the Challenger Deep for a series of three dives to depths exceeding 10900 meters. It has been suggested that more is known about the Moon than the deepest parts of the ocean, little was known about the extent of life on the deep ocean floor until the discovery of thriving colonies of shrimps and other organisms around hydrothermal vents in the late 1970s. Before the discovery of the vents, it had been accepted that almost all life on earth obtained its energy from the sun. The new discoveries revealed groups of creatures that obtained nutrients and energy directly from thermal sources, the revolutionary discovery that life can exist under these extreme conditions changed opinions about the chances of there being life elsewhere in the universe. Scientists now speculate that Europa, one of Jupiters moons, may be able to support life beneath its icy surface, natural light does not penetrate the deep ocean, with the exception of the upper parts of the mesopelagic. Since photosynthesis is not possible, plants cannot live in this zone, since plants are the primary producers of almost all of earths ecosystems, life in this area of the ocean must depend on energy sources from elsewhere. Except for the close to the hydrothermal vents, this energy comes from organic material drifting down from the photic zone. The sinking organic material is composed of algal particulates, detritus, and other forms of biological waste, because pressure in the ocean increases by about 1 atmosphere for every 10 meters of depth, the amount of pressure experienced by many marine organisms is extreme. With the advent of traps that incorporate a special pressure-maintaining chamber, salinity is remarkably constant throughout the deep sea, at about 35 parts per thousand
9.
Hydrothermal vent
–
A hydrothermal vent is a fissure in a planets surface from which geothermally heated water issues. Hydrothermal vents are found near volcanically active places, areas where tectonic plates are moving apart, ocean basins. Hydrothermal vents exist because the earth is both active and has large amounts of water on its surface and within its crust. Common land types include hot springs, fumaroles and geysers, under the sea, hydrothermal vents may form features called black smokers. Chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea form the base of the chain, supporting diverse organisms, including giant tube worms, clams, limpets. Active hydrothermal vents are believed to exist on Jupiters moon Europa, and Saturns moon Enceladus, Hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean typically form along the mid-ocean ridges, such as the East Pacific Rise and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. These are locations where two plates are diverging and new crust is being formed. The proportion of each varies from location to location, in contrast to the approximately 2 °C ambient water temperature at these depths, water emerges from these vents at temperatures ranging from 60 to as high as 464 °C. Due to the hydrostatic pressure at these depths, water may exist in either its liquid form or as a supercritical fluid at such temperatures. The critical point of water is 375 °C at a pressure of 218 atmospheres, however, introducing salinity into the fluid raises the critical point to higher temperatures and pressures. The critical point of seawater is 407 °C and 298.5 bars, accordingly, if a hydrothermal fluid with a salinity of 3.2 wt. % NaCl vents above 407 °C and 298.5 bars, furthermore, the salinity of vent fluids have been shown to vary widely due to phase separation in the crust. The critical point for lower salinity fluids is at lower temperature and pressure conditions than that for seawater, for example, a vent fluid with a 2.24 wt. % NaCl salinity has the point at 400 °C and 280.5 bars. Thus, water emerging from the hottest parts of some hydrothermal vents can be a supercritical fluid, examples of supercritical venting are found at several sites. Sister Peak vents low salinity phase-separated, vapor-type fluids, sustained venting was not found to be supercritical but a brief injection of 464 °C was well above supercritical conditions. A nearby site, Turtle Pits, was found to vent low salinity fluid at 407 °C, which is above the critical point of the fluid at that salinity. A vent site in the Cayman Trough named Beebe, which is the worlds deepest known hydrothermal site at ~5000 m below sea level, has shown sustained supercritical venting at 401 °C and 2.3 wt% NaCl
10.
Peat bogs
–
A bog is a wetland that accumulates peat, a deposit of dead plant material—often mosses, and in a majority of cases, sphagnum moss. It is one of the four types of wetlands. Other names for bogs include mire, quagmire, and muskeg and they are frequently covered in ericaceous shrubs rooted in the sphagnum moss and peat. The gradual accumulation of decayed plant material in a bog functions as a carbon sink, Bogs occur where the water at the ground surface is acidic and low in nutrients. In some cases, the water is derived entirely from precipitation, water flowing out of bogs has a characteristic brown colour, which comes from dissolved peat tannins. In general, the low fertility and cool climate results in relatively slow plant growth, large areas of landscape can be covered many metres deep in peat. Bogs have distinctive assemblages of animal, fungal and plant species, Bogs are widely distributed in cold, temperate climes, mostly in boreal ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. The worlds largest wetland is the bogs of the Western Siberian Lowlands in Russia. Large peat bogs also occur in North America, particularly the Hudson Bay Lowland and they are less common in the Southern Hemisphere, with the largest being the Magellanic moorland, comprising some 44,000 square kilometres. Sphagnum bogs were widespread in northern Europe but have often been cleared and drained for agriculture, a 2014 expedition leaving from Itanga village, Republic of the Congo discovered a peat bog as big as England which stretches into neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. There are many highly specialised animals, fungi and plants associated with bog habitat, most are capable of tolerating the combination of low nutrient levels and waterlogging. Sphagnum moss is generally abundant, along with ericaceous shrubs, the shrubs are often evergreen, which is understood to assist in conservation of nutrients. In drier locations, evergreen trees can occur, in case the bog blends into the surrounding expanses of boreal evergreen forest. Sedges are one of the more common herbaceous species, carnivorous plants such as sundews and pitcher plants have adapted to the low-nutrient conditions by using invertebrates as a nutrient source. Orchids have adapted to these conditions through the use of fungi to extract nutrients. Some shrubs such as Myrica gale have root nodules in which nitrogen fixation occurs, Bogs are recognized as a significant/specific habitat type by a number of governmental and conservation agencies. They can provide habitat for mammals, such as caribou, moose, the United Kingdom in its Biodiversity Action Plan establishes bog habitats as a priority for conservation. Russia has a reserve system in the West Siberian Lowland
. PMID 18664583.
