Blood Falls

This path has been a mystery since geoscientist Griffith Taylor discovered Blood Falls in Lead author Jessica Badgeley, then an undergraduate student at Colorado College, worked with University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Erin Pettit and her research team to understand this unique feature. They used a type of radar to detect the brine feeding Blood Falls. Blood Falls is famous for its sporadic releases of iron-rich salty water.

The brine turns red when the iron contacts air. The team tracked the brine with radio-echo sounding, a radar method that uses two antenna—one to transmit electrical pulses and one to receive the signals. Pettit said the researchers made another significant discovery - that liquid water can persist inside an extremely cold glacier.

Scientists previously thought this was nearly impossible, but Pettit said the freezing process explains how water can flow in a cold glacier. The heat and the lower freezing temperature of salty water make liquid movement possible. Pettit said she enlisted Badgeley as an undergraduate student to help with the overall mission of understanding the hydrological plumbing of cold-based glaciers. Bubbles from glacier ice turn up the noise in Alaska fjords.

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An englacial hydrologic system of brine within a cold glacier: According to Mikucki et al. It explains how other microorganisms could have survived when the Earth according to the Snowball Earth hypothesis was entirely frozen over.

Ice-covered oceans might have been the only refugia for microbial ecosystems when the Earth apparently was covered by glaciers at tropical latitudes during the Proterozoic eon about to million years ago. This unusual place offers scientists a unique opportunity to study deep subsurface microbial life in extreme conditions without the need to drill deep boreholes in the polar ice cap , with the associated contamination risk of a fragile and still-intact environment. The study of harsh environments on Earth is useful to understand the range of conditions to which life can adapt and to advance assessment of the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system, in places such as Mars or Europa , an ice-covered moon of Jupiter.

Scientists of the NASA Astrobiology Institute speculate that these worlds could contain subglacial liquid water environments favourable to hosting elementary forms of life, which would be better protected at depth from ultraviolet and cosmic radiation than on the surface. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved April 18, Retrieved April 17, Retrieved March 4, Retrieved October 17, Retrieved April 20, But there are also implications closer to home.

Projections of glacier movement are getting more important all the time. As the world warms up due to climate change , glaciers and ice sheets represent massive repositories of potentially-melting-ice —so their behavior can dictate how quickly the sea level rises.

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And as temperatures get warmer, more glaciers might end up juuuuuust warm enough to allow for this same phenomenon to occur. We may need to go back and investigate those more to account for that.

There you have it, folks. Antarctica's Blood Falls have shed their last veil of mystery in service of better alien-hunting space robots and sea level rise models. That seems like a pretty fair trade. And even if we know what it is and how it got there, blood-like liquid oozing from a glacier will never stop being delightfully creepy. By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy.

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