Mystery of Antarctica’s ‘Blood Falls’ is solved after 100 years

Science

Rob Waugh,Yahoo News UK 23 hours ago

Antarctica’s Blood Falls were first discovered in 1911 – a

cliff stained with blood-red water, pouring into the sea.

It rapidly became known as Blood Falls – and experts assumed that algae in the water were behind the strange red colour.

But it’s actually something much weirde – oozing, iron-rich brine which oxidises when it comes in contact with air, in the same way that iron rusts.

Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks say that the ‘rusty’ water comes from a small saltwater lake trapped beneath a glacier, which may have been there for a million years.

The researchers say the lake is so salty it can’t freeze at normal temperatures – and scrapes irons from the bedrock as it seeps through the ice to Blood Falls.

They used a type of radar to detect the brine feeding Blood Falls.

‘We moved the antennae around the glacier in grid-like patterns so that we could ‘see’ what was underneath us inside the ice, kind of like a bat uses echolocation to ‘see’ things around it,’said co-author Christina Carr, a doctoral student at UAF.

The researchers found that the liquid water actually persisted inside an extremely cold glacier – something that scientists previously thought was impossible.

‘While it sounds counterintuitive, water releases heat as it freezes, and that heat warms the surrounding colder ice,’ she said. ‘Taylor Glacier is now the coldest known glacier to have persistently flowing water.”