Antarctic Glacier With Blood-Red Waterfall
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Is this really blood? Like some animal is inside the glacier that may have gotten itself killed and its blood oozed out and looking like in the photo? Well, here’s the scoop on that.
Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze”.
The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 6:51 am and is filed under nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
