Blood Falls is a waterfall of vibrant red-faced water that ooze out of the Taylor Glacier in Victoria Land , East Antarctica . For decades , this foreign sight confused the dauntless explorers who managed to reach out this distant vale . While we now have a square idea of what ’s causing this hellish phenomenon , enquiry over the retiring few decades has unveil that this little slice of Antarctica is perhaps even weirder than it first appears .
pedigree Fall wasfirst foundin 1911 by British explorer Thomas Griffith " Grif " Taylor during one of the early Antarctic expeditions by Europeans . At the time , Taylor and his gang call back the vibrant color wasdue to red alga .
However , this later evidence to be wrong . It was n’t until the sixties that scientist were able to show that Blood Falls ’ violent hue was actually the result of iron salinity , or ferrous hydroxide , that were being shove out of the ice mainsheet .
It’s bloody cold! Another shot of Antarctica’s Blood Falls. Image credit: Peter Rejcek/NSF/Public Domain
Microorganisms might still be part of the wide of the mark picture , though . In 2009 , scientistsdiscoveredthat the reddish body of water ooze out of the Taylor Glacier originates in a saltwater lake that ’s laid snare in the ice-skating rink for 1.5 to 4 million year . In fact , this lake is just one part of a muchlarger hole-and-corner systemof hyper - salty lakes and aquifers .
Analysis of the water from Blood Falls indicated that the bury bodies of super salty pee are home to a rarified subglacial ecosystem of bacterium – despite an almost entire absence of oxygen . This means the bacteria is persisting without photosynthesis and likely sustains itself through cycling smoothing iron from the brine .
On top of this , the water is well below freezing point , with a temperature of around -7 ° C ( 19.4 ° farad ) when it will the glacier . It only manages to stay liquid due to its high table salt content .
The illustration shows where the source water for Blood Falls comes from. Image credit: NSF. Image credit: NSF
Much to the annoyance of scientist , it ’s still unclear what is actually pushing the reddish brine out of the glacier to the surface . understandably , there is a colossal geologic force give way on , but wehave little ideaof what that violence is .
Since the water has been trapped beneath the glacier for million of years , the outpour from Blood Falls could act as a “ time glacier ” from an era when our planet was very different to now . A 2009 newspaper publisher explain that the Blood Falls system and its strange microbial inhabits could explain how life on Earth managed to survive in times when the entire globe was freeze over , such as during theproposed Snowball Earth period .
It could also shed some igniter on how lifeforms could potentially subsist on other planets with similar subglacial bodies of frozen water , such asMarsand Jupiter ’s moonEuropa .
