Did you know that there was a fifty-foot, blood-red waterfall in Antartica? Did you know that it was discovered in 1911? The Australian geologist, Griffith Taylor, who discovered the falls thought that the water was colored by red algae. However the true answer is even more amazing. Take a look at the picture, and notice the tent in the lower left-hand corner. That gives a scale for the size of the waterfall.
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.
via Blood Falls | Taylor Glacier, Antarctica | Atlas Obscura.
