A Place Beyond Earth: The Surreal Landscape and Ecosystem of Yellowstone

Let's start the first topic with a road trip that I took from western to central United States. Crossed the red rock area of Arizona and Utah, the Yellowstone National Park is located at the northwest corner of Wyoming.

It is the first national park in the world, established in 1872. At the same time one of the world's most spectacular national parks.

 

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

 

 

The landscape in the park was the result of a massive eruption of a super volcano 2 million years ago. It contains over ten thousands of geothermal sceneries, thus hot springs and geysers. Countless kinds of microbes are thriving in the hydrotherm that was gushed out of the cracked surface.

 

In the Grand Prismatic, which is the most visited scene spot of the park. Microbes gathered on the bottom under the hot water to form a colorful bacteria mat. These amazing little creatures are so called "Thermophiles" or "Thermophilic Bacterias". They are generally classified as a kind of Extremophile, which means that they prefer to or could only live in a extreme environment and could still maintain their bioactivity in those situations.

Thermophiles could withstand extreme high temperature which could probably makes the protein of other creatures denaturate and kills them.  For Extremophiles, they have their complete different ways to live and get energy. In a sense, they are not similar to most of the life forms on earth as we know until now.

 

There are more types of Extremophiles, such as:

Lithoautotrophs (use inorganic matter to produce energy)
Barophiles (prefer to live under high gravity enviroment)
Hypergravity Organisms (could live under over 15~400 thousand times normal gravity)
Toxitolerantes (prefer, withstand poison)
Radioresistants (withstand radiation over 500 Gy)
Hyperthermophiles (live under higher temperature than Thermophiles)
Psychrophiles,Cryophiles (live under low temperature, some Cryophiles withstand -20℃~ -200℃)
Polyextremophiles (live under various extreme environments)

By the way, they are not limited to microbes.

The existence of these unique extreme ecosystems provide a glance to the scientists into another world beyond our assumption. Are life and earth themselves different from what people used to imagine? Are alien worlds far away in other galaxies? Or they are just being together with us on this planet which we thought we were familiared with, but actually not.