A seeming waterfall of blood in the Antarctic may sound like something from an HP Lovecraft story. But scientists say they’ve found a perfectly mundane explanation for this strange landscape feature, spoiling the cosmic horror.
The Blood Falls, as it’s known, is located on the snout of the Taylor Glacier in eastern Antarctica — and isn’t coursing with actual blood. Unfortunate penguins are not being pulverized into a sanguine stew between oscillating chunks of bobbing ice. The continent is not sending us an SOS signal about climate change (at least not here).
But since the Blood Falls were first discovered in 1911 by geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor, scientists have been stumped on the origins of its striking color, not to mention what’s causing the grisly spout to be pumped out of the ground and preventing it from freezing.
That’s changed in recent decades. Originally believed to be caused by microalgae, scientists came to suspect that its color came instead from iron in the water, originating from a subterranean lake, that instantly oxidized when it was expelled and exposed to air.
Except this explanation, it turned out, was also a slight — dare we say — red herring.
More recent work revealed that the iron didn’t come in mineral form, but was instead trapped into tiny structures called nanospheres. The iron particles were probably packaged that way by ancient, metal metabolizing bacteria that lived in a lake buried deep beneath the glacier, with the iron coming from the lake bed. The water was also extremely briny, scientists found, preventing it from freezing.
If that’s the mystery of the blood solved, the question remains: what’s pumping it? A new study, published in the journal Antarctic Science, provides an answer. Lead author Peter Doran, a geoscientist at Louisiana State University, and colleagues suggest it’s being expulsed from its subglacial source — the buried, briny lake — due to the weight and movement of the overlying glacier.
The discovery was made by combining GPS data, a visual time-lapse of the Blood Falls, and real-time temperature readings. They found that when the Blood Falls erupted in 2018, temperatures plunged deep underneath the glacier, corresponding to changes in pressure. The culprit was the glacier dropping by less than in inch during the eruption, the instruments observed. The pressure placed on the hidden briny water pushes it towards cracks through which it suddenly erupts.
More on Antarctica: Antarctica’s Gravity Hole Growing Stronger, Scientists Find
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