Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

“Would there be any warning?”

“Probably not. The last significant explosion in the park was at a place called Pork Chop Geyser in 1989. That left a crater about five meters across-not huge by any means, but big enough if you happened to be standing there at the time. Fortunately, nobody was around so nobody was hurt, but that happened without warning. In the very ancient past there have been explosions that have made holes a mile across. And nobody can tell you where or when that might happen again. You just have to hope that you’re not standing there when it does.”

Big rockfalls are also a danger. There was a big one at Gardiner Canyon in 1999, but again fortunately no one was hurt. Late in the afternoon, Doss and I stopped at a place where there was a rock overhang poised above a busy park road. Cracks were clearly visible. “It could go at any time,” Doss said thoughtfully.

“You’re kidding,” I said. There wasn’t a moment when there weren’t two cars passing beneath it, all filled with, in the most literal sense, happy campers.

“Oh, it’s not likely,” he added. “I’m just saying it could . Equally it could stay like that for decades. There’s just no telling. People have to accept that there is risk in coming here. That’s all there is to it.”

As we walked back to his vehicle to head back to Mammoth Hot Springs, Doss added: “But the thing is, most of the time bad things don’t happen. Rocks don’t fall. Earthquakes don’t occur. New vents don’t suddenly open up. For all the instability, it’s mostly remarkably and amazingly tranquil.”

“Like Earth itself,” I remarked.

“Precisely,” he agreed.

The risks at Yellowstone apply to park employees as much as to visitors. Doss got a horrific sense of that in his first week on the job five years earlier. Late one night, three young summer employees engaged in an illicit activity known as “hot-potting”-swimming or basking in warm pools. Though the park, for obvious reasons, doesn’t publicize it, not all the pools in Yellowstone are dangerously hot. Some are extremely agreeable to lie in, and it was the habit of some of the summer employees to have a dip late at night even though it was against the rules to do so. Foolishly the threesome had failed to take a flashlight, which was extremely dangerous because much of the soil around the warm pools is crusty and thin and one can easily fall through into a scalding vent below. In any case, as they made their way back to their dorm, they came across a stream that they had had to leap over earlier. They backed up a few paces, linked arms and, on the count of three, took a running jump. In fact, it wasn’t the stream at all. It was a boiling pool. In the dark they had lost their bearings. None of the three survived.

I thought about this the next morning as I made a brief call, on my way out of the park, at a place called Emerald Pool, in the Upper Geyser Basin. Doss hadn’t had time to take me there the day before, but I thought I ought at least to have a look at it, for Emerald Pool is a historic site.

In 1965, a husband-and-wife team of biologists named Thomas and Louise Brock, while on a summer study trip, had done a crazy thing. They had scooped up some of the yellowy-brown scum that rimmed the pool and examined it for life. To their, and eventually the wider world’s, deep surprise, it was full of living microbes. They had found the world’s first extremophiles-organisms that could live in water that had previously been assumed to be much too hot or acid or choked with sulfur to bear life. Emerald Pool, remarkably, was all these things, yet at least two types of living things, Sulpholobus acidocaldarius and Thermophilus aquaticus as they became known, found it congenial. It had always been supposed that nothing could survive above temperatures of 50°C (122°F), but here were organisms basking in rank, acidic waters nearly twice that hot.

For almost twenty years, one of the Brocks’ two new bacteria, Thermophilus aquaticus , remained a laboratory curiosity until a scientist in California named Kary B. Mullis realized that heat-resistant enzymes within it could be used to create a bit of chemical wizardry known as a polymerase chain reaction, which allows scientists to generate lots of DNA from very small amounts-as little as a single molecule in ideal conditions. It’s a kind of genetic photocopying, and it became the basis for all subsequent genetic science, from academic studies to police forensic work. It won Mullis the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993.

Meanwhile, scientists were finding even hardier microbes, now known as hyperthermophiles, which demand temperatures of 80°C (176°F) or more. The warmest organism found so far, according to Frances Ashcroft in Life at the Extremes , is Pyrolobus fumarii , which dwells in the walls of ocean vents where the temperature can reach 113°C (235.4°F). The upper limit for life is thought to be about 120°C (248°F), though no one actually knows. At all events, the Brocks’ findings completely changed our perception of the living world. As NASA scientist Jay Bergstralh has put it: “Wherever we go on Earth-even into what’s seemed like the most hostile possible environments for life-as long as there is liquid water and some source of chemical energy we find life.”

Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed. This is a very good thing, for as we are about to see, we live in a world that doesn’t altogether seem to want us here.

IT ISN’T EASY being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

From the bottom of the deepest ocean trench to the top of the highest mountain, the zone that covers nearly the whole of known life, is only something over a dozen miles-not much when set against the roominess of the cosmos at large.

For humans it is even worse because we happen to belong to the portion of living things that took the rash but venturesome decision 400 million years ago to crawl out of the seas and become land based and oxygen breathing. In consequence, no less than 99.5 percent of the world’s habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally-in practical terms completely-off-limits to us.

It isn’t simply that we can’t breathe in water, but that we couldn’t bear the pressures. Because water is about 1,300 times heavier than air, pressures rise swiftly as you descend-by the equivalent of one atmosphere for every ten meters (thirty-three feet) of depth. On land, if you rose to the top of a five-hundred-foot eminence-Cologne Cathedral or the Washington Monument, say-the change in pressure would be so slight as to be indiscernible. At the same depth underwater, however, your veins would collapse and your lungs would compress to the approximate dimensions of a Coke can. Amazingly, people do voluntarily dive to such depths, without breathing apparatus, for the fun of it in a sport known as free diving. Apparently the experience of having your internal organs rudely deformed is thought exhilarating (though not presumably as exhilarating as having them return to their former dimensions upon resurfacing). To reach such depths, however, divers must be dragged down, and quite briskly, by weights. Without assistance, the deepest anyone has gone and lived to talk about it afterward was an Italian named Umberto Pelizzari, who in 1992 dove to a depth of 236 feet, lingered for a nanosecond, and then shot back to the surface. In terrestrial terms, 236 feet is just slightly over the length of one New York City block. So even in our most exuberant stunts we can hardly claim to be masters of the abyss.