Friday, May 11, 2012
Blood red falls of primordial "ooze"
The five-story, red waterfall known as the Blood Falls got its name after explorer and geologist Griffith Taylor stumbled across it in 1911 and thought it resembled blood pouring from a wound. 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.
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