The reddish deposit was found in 1911 by the Australian geologist Griffith Taylor, who first explored the valley that bears his name. The Antarctica pioneers first attributed the red color to red algae. But a lot of hypothesis came into play. Some said that weird creatures might be trapped in a sunless, frigid, briny dungeon deep beneath the ice at Blood Falls — but scientists have a different explanation.
The source of the red color was later discovered to be an iron-rich underground saltwater lake that was trapped by the encroaching glacier at least 1.5 million years ago. The temperature of the water is -5 Celsius, but it’s so salty that it doesn’t freeze.
But the Blood Falls houses another secret, which scientists from Harvard University have started to uncover – it’s home to an entire ecosystem of bacteria, trapped for millennia in conditions that are extremely inhospitable to life.
Here’s a illustration of their hypothesis.
According to Mikucki et al. (2009), the now-inaccessible subglacial pool was sealed off 1.5 to 2 million years ago and transformed into a kind of “time capsule,” isolating the ancient microbial population for a sufficiently long time to evolve independently of other similar marine organisms. It explains how other microorganisms could have survived when the Earth (according to the Snowball Earth hypothesis) was entirely frozen over.
The fascinating secrets still remain locked inside the inaccessible sub-glacier lake.
Source: Glacier diagram by Zina Deretsky; Blood Falls by Ralph Maestas/Wikipedia
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