The Earth Story

Champagne Pool This geothermal pool is located on New Zealand’s North Island. The hot spring below the pool has temperatures of up to 260°C; however, the pool’s water varies in between 69-74°C. The pool holds its name due to the carbon dioxide content of the water which creates small bubbles (like the ones seen in a glass of champagne). The orange ring around the pool in the image occurs due to deposits of metalloids (a substance with a mixture of properties of both metals and non-metals) in the water such as stibnite. The water from the champagne Pool also feeds the Artist's Palette. The Artist's Palette is another geothermal pool; however, the water in this pool has a yellow tinge due to sulphur deposition. ~SA http://bit.ly/1UfYaGw by Christian Mehlführer

Hubnerite One of the main ores of tungsten, like many metal minerals it forms a solid solution between a manganese (in this case, though magnesium is more common) and an iron end member (called wolframite), where the individual crystal can occupy any place along the spectrum of compositions between them. The crystals have a very bright lustre, and range from opaque black, through dark yellowish brown to a deep and dark transparent red like the specimen in the photo. Crystals are often flat tablets with lines down the long axis called striations. Like many metallic ores it is very dense in the hand, and fairly soft, with a hardness on Mohs scratch scale of 4.5.

Quartz and gold Quartz and gold are very different minerals. One is an oxide, one is a metal. One is only a single element, the other is a compound of two different elements. One has a high hardness and is tough to scratch, the other is soft and easily scratched. However, these two distinct minerals are found here together for a very important chemical reason.

Nisyros Volcano Nisyros island sits at the far eastern end of the Greek Isles, at the southeastern edge of the Aegean Sea with Turkey being the closest landmass. It has a population of about 1000 people living on it, and a long legacy of volcanic activity.

Crater lake at  Illamatepeq volcano, El Salvador

Sulfur coated geothermal vent, Mutnovsky Volcano, Kamchatka

In this surreal photograph, the remotely-operated submersible Hercules hangs illuminated over the shoreline of a small and murky lake, some four thousand feet under the surface of the sea in the Gulf of Mexico. Such an image seems so alien to us surface-dwellers as to defy logical explanation, but it is actually a common feature of the oil-rich Gulf - pools of salty brine and hydrocarbons, seeping up from the rocks below. The liquid settles on the sea floor, being much denser than water, forming the nucleus of a bizarre 'cold seep' ecosystem. Cold seeps were discovered in the eighties by US Navy subs, and were explored soon afterwards. The brine lakes were the most striking features of the sites (tales being told of exploration vehicles floating on the surface of the dense liquid), but around them the seabed was found to be teeming with deep-water life: shoals of sluggish fish, slow-growing tube worms and huge beds of mussels, which turned out to possess tissues filled with chemosynthetic bacteria producing energy by metabolising the methane rising from the oil-rich bedrock. The mussels and their dependant hordes of fish, crabs, amphipods, and the like, were a self-contained ecosystem, surviving purely on energy from methane; like the better-known hydrothermal vent systems, which rely on hydrogen sulphide, the animals of the cold seep successfully exist without any energy input from the sun.

Cold seeps and hydrothermal vents are popular candidates for the sites where life first arose. Similar systems may exist in deep oceans on other worlds, and the search for alien life forms in our solar system is likely to focus on searching for sites such as these on the moons of the gas giants.

-TJT

Photo courtesy of the Nautilus Expedition (2014) To see a stunning video of the Nautilus expedition submersible exploring the brine pool in the Gulf of Mexico, go to their website : http://www.nautiluslive.org/video/2013/07/31/brine-pool-underwater-lake For more about the formation of these bizarre features, read this great article on the Ocean Explorer website: http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/02mexico/background/brinepool/brinepool.html_ [

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