The 100-year-old mystery of Antarctica's Blood Falls finally solved

If you haven’t happened to have come back from a recent trip to Antarctica, you might not know the science behind a perplexing part of the ice-cold region.

While it is hardly a tourist destination for most people, for geologists and biologists Antarctica can be a fascinating region of our planet.

One particular area that gets attention from those even outside of the scientific community is Blood Falls.

Located in East Antarctica, it appears that blood is flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier. (PBS Terra)

Located in East Antarctica, it appears as if blood is flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land.

Speaking to PBS Terra’s Arlo Perez and Caitlin Saks, scientists researching in the area explained the phenomenon and the work they do in the region.

Hydrogeologist of Louisiana State University said: “Blood Falls is a bit of an obsession for a lot of people, there is nothing else like it on Earth.

“It is an outlier so we learn from those extremes, it is different from anything else we know.

“It is really like any other lake on Earth but there is just a really thick ice cover that stays here all the time.”

The video, released in 2020, also shows Saks getting a closer look at Blood Falls while accompanied by microbiologist Jill Mikucki of the University of Tennessee.

Mikucki explained: “All the red here is iron oxides, but as you can see, this water here is pretty clear. If the water is clear and there’s iron in it, that means it hasn’t been oxidized yet.

“As it spends time at the surface, that’s when it becomes oxidized and leaves this beautiful red color around.”

"Blood Falls is a bit of an obsession for a lot of people, there is nothing else like it on Earth." (PBS Terra)

This essentially means that all the red crust seen on the glacier is rust, not an overactive polar bear creating a bloody mess hunting.

It is also worth noting the Taylor Glacier is not frozen to the bedrock like most Antarctic glaciers. This is speculated to be due to the presence of salts concentrated by the crystallization of the ancient seawater below it.

Mikucki went on to explain that understanding how microbes can survive in such a hostile and salty environment could help us better understand how they could possibly survive in other places in our solar system like Mars.

Topics: Science, Antarctica, News

Gerrard Kaonga

Gerrard is a Journalist at UNILAD and has dived headfirst into covering everything from breaking global stories to trending entertainment news. He has a bachelors in English Literature from Brunel University and has written across a number of different national and international publications. Most notably the Financial Times, Daily Express, Evening Standard and Newsweek.