Unraveling the Enigma of the Mysterious Bloody Falls in Antarctica

In a pale world of ice and snow, the last color you expect to see on the horizon is red.

In 1911, during a British expedition to Antarctica, explorers were shocked to notice that a glacier was “bleeding” onto an ice-covered lake.

This is known as Blood Falls and it took over a century to find out its real cause.

And when a team of American scientists took samples from the Taylor Glacier in November 2006 and mid-to-late November 2018 and analyzed the contents with high-powered electron microscopes, they found the real culprit.

Although many studies have been carried out on the chemical composition and microbes living in the effluents of the Blood Falls in Antarctica, a complete analysis of their mineral composition has not been carried out. Using a variety of analytical equipment, the researchers found several surprises that helped better explain the characteristic red color.

“As soon as I looked at the microscopic images, I noticed that there were these little iron-rich nanoshells,” explains materials scientist Ken Levy from Johns Hopkins University.

The tiny particles come from ancient microbes and are one-hundredth the size of a human red blood cell. It is extremely abundant in the meltwater of the Taylor Glacier, named after the British scientist Thomas Griffith Taylor, who first noticed Blood Falls on an expedition from 1910 to 1913.

In addition to iron, the nanospheres also contain silicon, calcium, aluminum and sodium. This unique combination is part of what turns the salty subglacial water red as it slides off the tongue of the glacier and first encounters a world of oxygen, sunlight and heat. time for a long time.

“For atoms to be metal, they must be organized into a very specific crystalline structure,” Levy explains. “These nanoshells are not crystalline, so the methods previously used to study solids could not detect them.”

Hundreds of meters below the ice on Antarctica’s Taylor Glacier lives an ancient microbial community that has evolved in isolation over thousands, maybe millions of years.

Thus, it is a useful playground for astrobiologists who hope to discover hidden life forms on other planets as well.

But new results show that if robots like the rover don’t have the right equipment on board, they won’t be able to detect all life forms beneath the planet’s icy bodies.

For example, the spectroscopic equipment used to identify nanospheres in the current study could not be transported to Antarctica. Instead, the samples had to be sent to laboratories abroad.

The results support a previous hypothesis that the reason scientists have yet to detect the presence of life on Mars is because current technology cannot always identify signs of life, even when the rover is moving directly over it.

And if a Martian rover lands in Antarctica right now, for example, it won’t be able to detect the microbial nanospheres that turn Taylor’s ice station red.

The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Space.

Source: Science Alert