Russell's Blog

Anna at Central Thermal Field. As the ranking Russian in our group, she is our chief scientist for this field expedition.

We awoke to heavy fog and rain this morning, and it was very cold. I went with Alex, Anna and Frank on a long hike to a group of petroleum-bearing springs. Along the way, we stopped at Boiling Spring (Burlyaschy in Russian), which really is boiling. We measured 96C near the edge, and it's about the size of a backyard swimming pool!

Boiling Spring.

Frank suggested on the walk back a few hours later that Boiling Spring might be an interesting metagenomic target; it's surrounded by extremely acidic formations -- we measured pH of 0.8 at one of them -- and yet Boiling Spring itself is at pH 7. It's likely to be relatively isolated from the surrounding environments. Because Uzon is much nearer to sea level than Yellowstone (650 meters, according to my phone), it's actually possible to find water at nearly 100C at the surface here. This suggests that it could be a good place to look for high temperature chemoautotrophs. Boiling Spring is also nearby an area known to be rich in petroleum sediments, so there could be high-temperature hydrocarbon utilizers too.

A petroileum-rich spring.

We then proceeded on to what Frank calls "the oil fields," where Alex, Frank and Anna took some more samples. There is a talk scheduled later at the Thermophiles Workshop by S.D. Varfolomeev called "The youngest oil on earth (Uzon, Kamchatka)," presenting evidence that there is petroleum at Uzon that is less than 50 years old!

Given the name "Oil Fields," I was expecting it to resemble La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. I spent a lot of time at the Page Museum when I was young, so many of my formative experiences involved mammoths and smiladons and lakes of bubbling tar. I caught a few whiffs of that smell, but it was mostly the usual hotspring rotten-eggs.

We passed the ranger station on the way back, around three o'clock in the afternoon.

Around three o'clock, the rain finally let up enough for me to crawl out of my cheap yellow poncho. We ate a little bread and cheese we brought with us (and a chocolate bar, of course), and started hiking back toward the station. Along the way, we stopped to check on Frank's slides at K4 Well and then back to Red White and Green. Frank and Alex left some enrichment cultures to incubate at Red White and Green and another nearby spring with a very high temperature.

Alex and Anna wanted to keep working in the area, and so Frank and I hiked back to the station.

There was a tetrahedron of milk we opened for breakfast coffee, so I used it up to make an onion, garlic and dill fritatta for the two of us, and we talked some more about what might be living in the outflow from Boiling spring.

Alex and Anna eventually got back, and Anna made some scrambled eggs, and the ranger (Evgenij) joined us for lunch.

We spent the afternoon struggling to charge UPS for Bo's scanning voltometry gear. Balky generators and rain make a poor mix.

While that was going on, Bo, Albert and Sarah went to Burlyaschy (Boiling Spring). Albert spotted a mother bear with a cub nearby and moving toward them, so he readied one of our flare torches to scare them away. Before igniting the torch, Albert tried shouting a bit, and took a few steps toward the bears. The bears suddenly revealed themselves to be bushes in the fog, rattling in the wind.