Weird Places Blood Falls Taylor Glacier Antarctica

There are a lot of weird and strange places on earth and this is definitely one of them. In Antarctica there is a place where it looks like blood flows every so often out of the side of a Glacier.

Red liquid plumes out of the side of Taylor Glacier down onto the top of West Lake Bonney which is in the Taylor Valley in Victoria Land in East Antarctica. The side of this Glacier actually has red liquid flowing out of it. Is it the Earth bleeding or maybe something flowing up from the pits of hell?

There are so many things we know about Earth and there are also so many things that we do not know about and maybe never will.

Blood Falls is one of those places that we know about fortunately. I hate to burst your imaginative bubble but Blood Falls can be explained and is not blood flowing out of the pits of hell.

Blood Falls is in fact saltwater water that is tainted with iron oxide that sporadically spews out of the Glacier coming up from deep down from a sub-glacial pool of saltwater and iron oxide.

The pool of tainted water is somewhere around 400 meters below the surface and currently the size of the pool of water is unknown. The red coloured saltwater falls was discovered in 1911 by the man it was named after, Mr Griffith Taylor who was a geologist who was exploring the valley.

At first the geologic explorers thought the red flow of water was from red algae before it was tested and shown to be primarily iron oxide.  

The seawater in the ancient pool of saltwater was first trapped there over 5 million years ago when the sea level was much higher than it is today and the glacier slowly covered and trapped the lake.

What makes Blood Falls so weird is that there is actually a microbial ecosystem deep down in the ancient pool of red saltwater which has been there since the Miocene period over 5 million years ago.

What is really cool is that scientists don’t have to drill deep down for samples because the samples flow up to the surface. Look at the pictures. That's where the microbial life can be found. There are 17 or so different types of microbes that were found when the bloody water was tested.

Something else that is very strange that was also found was that there was almost no oxygen in the water. The microbes have been thriving for millions of years with virtually no oxygen or light.

Finding living organisms living in this type of environment must have scientists thinking about the possibilities of alien life on other planets and how they might be surviving differently than we expect them too now that we have found organisms living without oxygen here on Earth.

Some of these microbes that have been around for millions of years get to see the light of day only when they finally flow out of the side of the Glacier.

It makes sense that quite possibly there are living organisms trapped under ice covered planets and moons in the solar system like Saturn’s moon Titan or even under the ice covered poles of Planet Mars or maybe even our own moon.

I am sure as humans advance in technology that one day we will find out. For now we can enjoy the possibilities and keep exploring and learning about our own planet and what we can about others.   

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