Original Coverage: A Volatile Proposition: Exploring Life Inside Earth’s Most Extreme Environments

Poás volcano, located about fifty kilometers from San José, the capital of Costa Rica, is the product of many eruptions over geological time. At the crater’s center is a lake that is an eye-popping shade of turquoise. Despite the allure of the lake, no one is allowed to hike down into the crater itself, even when the volcano is calm. The reason for this is that the whole thing might erupt, possibly without warning.Microbes living in the crater lake are like real estate developers who build beach houses right on the sand dunes of the hurricane-pummeled coastline of North Carolina. High risk, high reward. If you want to know just how microbes cling to this unstable, hostile land, you have to put your skin in the game too. The team, which consisted of an unwieldy group of twenty-five scientists plus two separate film crews documenting our work, was spending two weeks driving around sampling hot springs all over northern Costa Rica.

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