Taylor Glacier Falls is a bright red waterfall that you wouldn't expect to see in the icy landscape of Antarctica. A team of scientists says they have solved the long-standing mystery surrounding the crimson waters of Antarctica's Blood Falls.
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The strange and terrifying sight was first discovered in 1911 by geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor. He claimed that this was due to the red algae found there. Fifty years later, it was discovered that the crimson color comes from iron salts. The interesting thing about the Blood Falls is that the water becomes clear when it comes out of the ice, but immediately turns red due to the oxidation of the iron by the air. This has been happening for millennia.
A new study examined water samples and discovered that iron appears in an unexpected form. It's not a technical mineral, but rather in the form of nanospheres that are 100 times smaller than human red blood cells.
"As soon as I looked at the images under the microscope, I noticed that there were these little nanospheres that are rich in iron and have a lot of different elements in them besides iron – silicon, calcium, aluminum, sodium – and they all vary," said Ken Livi, the study's lead author. "To be a mineral, the atoms have to be arranged in a very specific, crystalline structure. These nanospheres are not crystalline, so the methods that were previously used to examine solids didn't detect them."
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The implications of this discovery extend beyond Antarctica and even beyond Earth. Recently, scientists have traced the water to its source. It is a subglacial lake under high pressure, which is extremely salty, without light or oxygen, and in this area there is a microbial ecosystem that has remained isolated for millions of years. This suggests that there is a possibility of life on other planets with similarly unfavorable conditions, but we may not have the right equipment to find it.
"Our work has revealed that the analysis conducted by rovers is incomplete in determining the true nature of environmental materials on planetary surfaces," said Livi. "This is especially true for colder planets like Mars, where the materials formed may be nanoscale and non-crystalline. Consequently, our methods for detecting these materials are inadequate. To truly understand the nature of rocky planet surfaces, a transmission electron microscope would be essential, but it is currently not feasible to deploy one on Mars."
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The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.
