Tag: yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park has 50 mile ‘zone of death’ where all crime is ‘legal’… as expert reveals why loophole has never been closed

An iconic American park is hiding a 50-mile area where all crime is legal, an expert claims.

It’s been two decades since Professor Brian Kalt uncovered the ‘Zone of Death’ at Yellowstone National Park.

The Michigan State University College of Law professor published research in 2005 in a paper called The Perfect Crime.

He theorized that all crime in the 50-square-mile section of Yellowstone that sits in Idaho can’t be prosecuted.

Yellowstone stretches across nearly 4,000 square miles in Wyoming, with small portions of the park located in Montana and eastern Idaho. 

When Congress designated the park’s borders in 1872, Yellowstone became one of the few federal parks that fall exclusively under the federal government’s jurisdiction, meaning that states are powerless to prosecute crimes. 

According to the Sixth Amendment, alleged criminals are entitled to a trial by jury, comprised of residents who live in the district where the crime was committed. 

However, the 50-square-mile section of Yellowstone in Idaho is desolate land where no humans live. 

Therefore, any trial for a crime committed in the ‘Zone of Death’ would violate the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights. 

When Kalt initially published his research, he noted that the findings weren’t meant to inspire crime, but to raise awareness among lawmakers about a potential legal loophole – one that has yet to be closed.

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‘Giant’ viruses that formed 1.5bn years ago are discovered in Yellowstone’s Hot Springs

Giant viruses dating back 1.5 billion years were found in Yellowstone’s geothermal springs, which scientists claim could reveal the conditions under which life formed on Earth.

The viruses are labeled as ‘giant’ because they have extremely large genomes compared to regular viruses and pose no risk to humans but could explain what the conditions on Earth were like when single-cell organisms formed. 

Researchers at Rutgers University found that the viruses consisted of bacteria while others belonged to archaea – a single-cell organism similar to bacteria – which requires extreme environments to reproduce and eukaryote, which is found in fungi.

Previous theories suggested the viruses were more recent because hot springs come and go over time, but the latest study revealed they have lived at least as long as cellular organisms.

At first, the researchers believed the giant viruses wouldn’t be very old because as the hot springs form and disappear, meaning the viruses would have to re-form under hotter temperatures in the newly developed hot spring. 

Hot springs reside on dormant volcanoes whose magma heats the groundwater causing the steam and less dense hot water to rise up through the fissures in the earth, creating geysers and hot springs.

Yellowstone’s hot springs formed at least 15,000 years ago after the last glaciers in the region melted, allowing the geysers to spring up – but the bacteria was thriving for more than one billion years before.

However, the findings showed that ‘the connections between the viruses and [the hot springs] are ancient,’ Bhattacharya told Science.

The viruses thrive in temperatures exceeding 200 degrees Fahrenheit, high pressures or excessive salt concentrations and researchers believe they reproduce by infecting red algae in the hot springs.

Researchers analyzed DNA in Lemonade Creek – an acidic hot spring in Yellowstone that reaches temperatures of about 111 degrees Fahrenheit.

They took samples from the thick green mat that coated the creek’s floor, called Rhodophyta or red algae, and from the nearby soil and the area between rocks lying near the creek bed.

The researchers found that the DNA contained sequences of archaea, algae (eukaryote) and bacteria that hosted 3,700 potential viruses – about two-thirds were giant viruses that aren’t known to infect humans.

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