Hot Springs At Yellowstone Changed Their Color Due To Tourist Activity 48
An anonymous reader writes Researchers say that the different colors of the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park are caused by human contamination. From the article: "Researchers at Montana State University and Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany have created a simple mathematical model based on optical measurements that explains the stunning colors of Yellowstone National Park's hot springs and can visually recreate how they appeared years ago, before decades of tourists contaminated the pools with make-a-wish coins and other detritus. If Yellowstone National Park is a geothermal wonderland, Grand Prismatic Spring and its neighbors are the ebullient envoys, steaming in front of the camera and gracing the Internet with their ethereal beauty. While the basic physical phenomena that render these colorful delights have long been scientifically understood—they arise because of a complicated interplay of underwater vents and lawns of bacteria—no mathematical model existed that showed empirically how the physical and chemical variables of a pool relate to their optical factors and coalesce in the unique, stunning fashion that they do."
Lost in translation ... (Score:5, Funny)
tourists contaminated the pools with make-a-wish coins and other detritus.
Translation: "quit peeing in the pools!"
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>at the end of the day, we don't own entropy.
But we increase it every day, by one bit, every time we make a binary decision.
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Or you can accept that change not equal ruin. Go ahead and stamp your feet and whine about made up controversies like liberals do, or you an act like a troll about it.
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News flash, the pools change color overtime time anyway. Birds drown in them because they think they are normal lakes, dirty sediment water runs off in to it and other animals fall in.
And people dump all kinds of crap in those pools too. The problem isn't that humanity is evil, though obviously that is a seductive narrative for the occasion, but simply that there's so many people visiting.
If you were to drop a bison in, it would quickly, over the course of a few days be rendered down (in the original sense of the word) to at most a few tens of kilograms of bone. Further, they aren't the smartest animals in the Park, but they're smart enough to avoid Grand Prismatic. So on the animal s
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Rather than arguing about how much if any effect human garbage has on hot springs, how about teaching your son to NOT THROW GARBAGE AND STUFF INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NATURAL LANDMARK?!?!?
Public land closures (Score:5, Informative)
It may not seem like a big deal, but things like this are used more and more to justify land closures.
For what ever reason, the government has seen fit in the last 2 decades to make more and more public lands off limits to the public. Normally under the umbrella of "protecting" the lands or the public.
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Yes - this is very frustrating. I've been to caves that I used to be able to go further in. It's funny when the rangers states that you are in is as far as people have ever been allowed andyou can see the informational signs on the nice trail ahead of him
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As someone who goes to caves, you should be aware more than most of the cross-contamination you are unwittingly causing. One of the leading thoughts on white nose disease in bats is it is caused by the transportation of bacteria and such from one cave to another.
A family member works for the Bureau of Land Management and has seen firsthand what happens when people randomly go in and out of caves. Once a single bat has a white nose, the entire colony is on a death march, not to mention the general trash sp
Re:Public land closures (Score:4, Insightful)
If people wouldn't screw things up [yellowstonepark.com], or destroy parts of a park [nbcnews.com], or just not think [bbc.com], then this wouldn't be an issue, would it?
To use a phrase, this is why we can't have nice things.
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The responses aren't that heavy handed. They just close things off and the yahoos who want to go off-roading in wilderness get pissed. Meanwhile this "heavy-handed authority" is soon going to allow copper mining in a forest sacred to the natives of the region.
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The responses aren't that heavy handed. They just close things off and the yahoos who want to go off-roading in wilderness get pissed.
Honestly - who do you think this effects? The people going off the trails are not going to stop because there is yet another sign saying not to go off trail a bit sooner.
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True, but I don't really consider putting up a sign to be a heavy handed authoritarian tactic.
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How about the prison time or fines that comes with not following what is on the signs?
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Meanwhile this "heavy-handed authority" is soon going to allow copper mining in a forest sacred to the natives of the region.
Because raping mother Earth for profit really shows off their light touch?
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Next time she goes to the ER and has DNA collected, I'll start to believe that she considers it rape instead of a good time.
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Well, considering that the US government cannot use religion as a basis for making decisions, I guess it is irrelevant what a bunch of ignorant folks who believe in magic think about the area, isn't it? At least, that has to be the perspective of the good liberal doesn't it? Or do we only ignore the religious beliefs of one or two religions?
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But it is basing this decision because of the religious beliefs of another group; ie, the religion of making more money out of nothing. Take the governments land and suck out the profits for the sole benefit of private individuals. The decision making basically comes down to who has the best or most expensive lobbyist on their side, since McCain doesn't seem to be able to think for himself like he used to.
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But it is basing this decision because of the religious beliefs of another group; ie, the religion of making more money out of nothing.
Looks more like their "religion" is making money by selling copper mined from the ground. That's a bit more than "nothing".
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Right but it's not copper they dug up from land they owned, but land they begged the government to give them access to.
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Sure they "own" it. It is public land so everyone owns it and the federal government is required by the documents that created the western states to use those lands to generate revenue. One of the recipients of the generated funds is supposed to be public education in those states and not public education in the eastern states. The feds renege on that promise every time they refuse mining, logging, drilling, etc. permits. If the federal government does not like the agreement then it should admit that it wil
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There is public interest in having public lands kept as wildernesses or parks. Not everything has to be for the benefit of profit, ranchers, or miners. Although that was the thinking a century and a half ago.
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There is public interest in having public lands kept as wildernesses or parks. Not everything has to be for the benefit of profit, ranchers, or miners.
And there is public interest in making public land private. Note that the majority of public land in the US is not currently kept as wilderness or parks. Where's the public interest in keeping that land public?
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Yep... we did Yellowstone a few years ago, and it was certainly the most crowded, commercialized, and overrated national park we've visited.
OTOH, it's also the park most likely to self-correct when the supervolcano blows, so there might be some value in allowing it to keep it's most-visited status if only to reduce traffic to other national parks.
We went there as part of a big loop, flying in/out of Denver and taking 2 weeks to camp at every national / state park, from RMNP to Zion, then up to Yellowstone.
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Yep... we did Yellowstone a few years ago, and it was certainly the most crowded, commercialized, and overrated national park we've visited.
Yellowstone covers 2,219,791 acres. You didn't see Yellowstone, you saw the crowded, commercialized, and famous segments of Yellowstone. I spent a week hiking there one year and the only other people within 3 miles of the trails I took were the rest of the group I went with. Also, I know there is MUCH more to Yellowstone than I've seen in about 4 visits (each roughly a week long, and each geographically overlapping only on visiting the Old Faithful Inn once each trip).
True that... we only spent 2 days driving around the main loop and didn't have time for a real hike, since we still had the rest of Wyoming between us and our flight out. But still, the fact remains that we wanted to spend more time at just about all the parks we visited (RMNP, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Arches, Canyonlands, National Reef, Fruita, Zion), but after a day at Yellowstone we just wanted to get back out to Grand Teton NP. I'm sure the wilderness away from the beaten path are awesome, but it
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Damn Americans going to Iceland and trashing the place.
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Geysir was clogged in the 1950s before the jet age, so it probably wasn't too very many American tourists.
Iceland destroyed half their geysers all by themselves for geothermal power plants:
http://www.nps.gov/yell/planyo... [nps.gov]
The US made a strong showing too, but both are far behind New Zealand.
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Yep. Private land too. I spent 7 years restoring a piece of private property surrounded by national forest, after a huge forest fire.
It took one or two guys on 4wd offroad vehicles, after tearing down and shooting up the private property signs and fences, then doing donuts and running all over the site one day, to destroy all the work I'd done terracing and replanting the site, and turn much of it into gravel and gullies in the next rains.
I'm sure they believed they were defending freedom.
Because freedom
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I'm sure they believed they were defending freedom.
I'm sure they a) didn't care and b) didn't think about it. The two go hand in hand.
Because freedom's just another word for nothing left to abuse.
You think freedom sucks for the environment? Try its absence for something even worse. Free people care about the environment far more than slaves.Classic example is the difference between the West and Communism during the Cold War. The Aral Sea is just about gone because way back when, some central planning group decided to turn a bunch of desert into farmland without considering the consequences. Bad stuff happens in the de
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It may not seem like a big deal, but things like this are used more and more to justify land closures.
Well, just about anything justifies a land closure now. The balcones canyonlands [fws.gov] was created for the express purpose of preservation and recreation which didn't infringe on the preservation goals. Yet, it has _NEVER_ been open for recreation even though the two species its intended to preserve are _MIGRATORY_ and only spend a few months a year in the preserve. The place is surrounded by fences and no tresp
Summary is a bit misleading (Score:5, Informative)
blinded by metaphor (Score:2)
what the fuck did I just read??
Buffalo Chips (Score:2)
they ought to put a stop to this (Score:2)
By "they" I mean the federal government. Ranger or remote surveillance, $5,000 fine + 7 days in jail mandatory sentence, no exceptions--then watch parents suddenly develop an interest in controlling their spawn. There is simply no excuse for this behavior, and no reason to tolerate it.