The Fly Geyser in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada appears like a landscape fallen out of time from a distant planet. Boiling hot, mineral-rich water emerges from seven openings, harboring a community of life that takes us back to the dawn of life itself. The young Earth may have looked much like this more than four billion years ago, when the conditions for the emergence of life developed in hot springs along the shores of the first oceans.
The bizarre red and yellow colors are created by the colonization of the geyser by thermophilic microorganisms. These ancient microorganisms derive their energy from sulfur, iron, and other inorganic compounds and belong to some of the most primordial forms of life on our planet. To this day, they preserve metabolic strategies that date back to the earliest days of Earth. Some of these species even thrive at temperatures above 100 °C.
In the cooler green pools, with temperatures of up to 50 °C, cyanobacteria live. They mark one of the most significant evolutionary steps and rank among the most consequential organisms in the history of Earth. More than 3,700 million years ago, they were the first to develop photosynthesis. In doing so, they released oxygen as a waste product – the gas that later enabled the evolution of complex life and thus our own existence.
Fly Geyser is unique in the world. Through its continuous discharge of hot water, it provides the microorganisms with a permanent habitat and thus enables the unique explosion of colors that makes this place so extraordinary.
At the beginning of Earth’s history, our planet was shaped to a particularly profound degree by volcanic heat, sulfur, and mineral-rich springs. In such extreme thermal environments, evolution had millions of years to experiment with this chemical primordial soup until the first forms of life emerged and eventually conquered the young Earth.
What appears to be an extraterrestrial landscape today thus tells the oldest story of our own origins. In the colors of the geyser, we encounter not only the beauty of a unique place, but also our most distant ancestors – the first pioneers of life, without whom our own existence would not have been possible.
