REU Yellowstone Trip 2017

The solar and electrical engineering REU students went on a group trip to Yellowstone on Saturday, June 3. We went to a lot of different places, all beautiful!

	A bison we saw walking along a river. There were some that walked in the road ahead of our car. The park service was trying to get them off of the road.
	The Grand Prismatic Pool. The browns, reds, yellows, and greens are caused by bacterial mats, caused by bacteria and other small organisms called "extremophiles." The kind that grow there is a function of temperature. The blue parts are caused by the scattering of blue-wavelength light in the water, and the shade is a function of pool depth.
	Another geothermal pool. This one is too hot to have bacterial mats, so it's at least 75 celsius. It still has the aforementioned scattering effect.
	Old Faithful. It sputtered for about 15 minutes before the actual eruption.
	A lake in the park. We pulled over because it was such a great view - you can see the actual Yellowstone Lake behind it.
	Me in front of Yellowstone Lake! There was a pretty steep cliff down to the shore.
	Artist Point: an overlook of a canyon with a waterfall at the end. It looks like someone dribbled watercolors over the cliffs. The whole scene looked like a dream and not quite real. (My companions agreed that it also looks like the waterfall that Bilbo and the dwarves go over in The Hobbit.)
	The paint pots! All of the colors are caused by bacterial mats like the ones at the geothermal pools. We spent a lot of time guessing the mechanism for forming the round shapes of the terraces.