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Grand Prismatic Spring, Wyoming, 1998

"The center of Yellowstone National Park's Grand Prismatic Spring steams at 199° Fahrenheit, too hot for the multicolored bacteria clustering on the cooler perimeter. But dead center is no dead zone: Billions of organisms called thermophiles flourish in the scalding water."

—From "Making Sense of the Millennium," January 1998, National Geographic magazine

Photograph by George Steinmetz