Before the 1960s, Yellowstone’s Morning Glory pool was a deep, sometimes tropical-looking blue. It was named after the flower that its color resembled. If you had visited Yellowstone in the 1940s, the pool would have looked something like a tropical blue ocean.
But then, the water’s color changed. The pool took on a distinctive hue, a green with orange and yellow edges. What caused the change? There was always a prime suspect: humans. Visitors to Yellowstone have been known to throw pennies, rocks and all sorts of garbage into Morning Glory. But their culpability wasn’t proven until recently, when a group of researchers created a mathematical model, based on optical measurements, that intended to explain just what happened.
The researchers found, according to Adam Hoffman over at Science Friday, that the blame did indeed lay mostly with the junk tossed into the spring by decades of tourists. All of that debris ultimately could have clogged up parts of the heat source hidden beneath the water’s surface and caused the pool’s temperature to lower.
At a lower temperature, the pool became a happy home to “photosynthetic microorganisms that probably didn’t live there before,” writes Hoffman. He explains further:
Pigments produced by swaths of those microbes—called microbial mats—are responsible, at least in part, for the brilliant yellows, greens, and oranges that now tinge Morning Glory and other thermal pools in Yellowstone. Each species has a preferred temperature, according to Brent Peyton, director of the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University. Because the springs are “hottest at the center and typically coolest at the edges,” a color gradient appears, he says.
The hues are also influenced by how light interacts with the water’s depth—turning it yellow and orange in the shallows and green in the deep end.
Description information quoted from Smithonian.com
To claim this cache as found you must message me through geocaching and answer the following questions. Do not post your answers in your log or post pictures of the information sign located at the pool.
1. The sign located at the pool isn’t titled morning glory pool. It is titled Fading Glory. From the information gathered from the sign what has changed geologically to cause the pool to fade? And what was the cause of this change?
2. What color is the pool now? THIS IS A TWO WORD DESCRIPTION FROM THE INFORMATION SIGN
3. What efforts have the national park rangers done to save this pool from extinction? How successful do you feel these efforts been?
4. Is the pool getting colder or hotter? What geologic evidence is there at the site to support your answer?
5. Not required, but feel free to post a picture of your crew at the pool.