In 1911, Australian explorer and geologist Griffith Taylor discovered a strange glacial feature in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valley, which is now known as Blood Falls. A five-story fall pours slowly out of the Taylor Glacier into Lake Bonney.
It is not only a waterfall in the frozen Anarctica, it's color is bright red which looks like a bleeding glacier; Mother nature keeps us amazed!
Two questions cross your mind on reading this: How the fall is bloody and not frozen? and How could the microbes have survived for so long, with no light or oxygen?!
The water in Blood Falls is something of an aqueous time capsule, preserved 400 meters underground. As the glaciers on top of the lake began to freeze, the water below became even saltier. Today, the salt content of the subglacial lake under Blood Falls is three times saltier than seawater and too salty to freeze.
the water that feeds Blood Falls is completely cut off from the atmosphere—it has never seen sunlight and is completely devoid of oxygen. It's also extremely rich in iron, When the iron-rich water comes into contact with the air, it rusts—depositing blood red stains on the ice as it falls.
When those glaciers covered the salt lakes, there were microbes living in the water, and they haven't gone anywhere, even though the water is now an extremely salty, oxygen-free bowl of complete darkness buried 400 meters under a glacier.
The microbes get their energy from breaking apart sulfates, which contain oxygen. After that, something eerily magical happens with the by-products—the iron in the water interacts with them to restore the sulfates, basically recycling the sulfates for the microbes to break down into oxygen over and over again.
The falls and McMurdo Dry Valley can only be reached by helicopter from nearby Antarctic research stations or cruise ships visiting the Ross Sea.
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