Tourists changed the color of the lake with coins

For decades, thousands of tourists visited the Yellowstone National Park. One of their favorite places is the small thermal spring Morning Glory. Over the years, a tradition has arisen to throw coins as well as stones and other garbage into this magnificent blue lake .

No one thought that coins and stones would partially block underground thermal springs and change the temperature of the lake. Therefore, now it began to be colonized by photosynthetic microorganisms of other species that could not live here before.



These new microbes formed the so-called cyanobacterial mats - highly integrated prokaryotic communities, which are partly responsible for the new palette of the Morning Lights and other thermal sources in Yellowstone.
')
Each bacterium has its own favorite temperature, so they are distributed in the water volume, the hottest in the center.

Scientists from the University of Montana and Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences (Germany) have compiled a mathematical model that accurately calculates the color at the last source temperature.



And how it looks now.



The paper was published in the journal Applied Optics (Applied Optics, Vol. 54, Issue 4, pp. B128-B139 (2015)).

It is easiest to conclude that the pollution of nature by man is bad. But in this case, not everything is so simple.

Firstly, the new colors are also beautiful. Secondly, it is a unique opportunity for biologists to observe the evolution of photosynthetic bacteria. At different depths, they absorb light in a different spectrum (that is, photons of different energies). Thanks to the evolutionary process, it is possible to obtain bacteria useful in the pharmaceutical industry, or enzymes for use in solar batteries, Science Friday writes .