Antarctica’s Blood Falls were first discovered in 1911 – a cliff stained with blood-red water, pouring into the sea.
It rapidly became known as Blood Falls – and experts assumed that algae in the water were behind the strange red colour.
But it’s actually something much weirder – oozing, iron-rich brine which oxidises when it comes in contact with air, in the same way that iron rusts.
Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks say that the ‘rusty’ water comes from a small saltwater lake trapped beneath a glacier, which may have been there for a million years.
The researchers say the lake is so salty it can’t freeze at normal temperatures – and scrapes irons from the bedrock as it seeps through the ice to Blood Falls.
They used a type of radar to detect the brine feeding Blood Falls.
‘We moved the antennae around the glacier in grid-like patterns so that we could ‘see’ what was underneath us inside the ice, kind of like a bat uses echolocation to ‘see’ things around it,’said co-author Christina Carr, a doctoral student at UAF.
The researchers found that the liquid water actually persisted inside an extremely cold glacier – something that scientists previously thought was impossible.
‘While it sounds counterintuitive, water releases heat as it freezes, and that heat warms the surrounding colder ice,’ she said. ‘Taylor Glacier is now the coldest known glacier to have persistently flowing water.”
The source of Antarctica's gruesome looking Blood Falls has finally been discovered putting an end to the mystery of where the red water came from.
At first it was thought some form of algae was discolouring the water, but that hypothesis was never verified.
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Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have now concluded that the blood resembling liquid is iron-rich brine that comes from a more than million-year-old lake trapped beneath the Taylor Glacier.
The colour of the water can be attributed to oxidised iron in brine. It is the same process that gives iron a dark red colour when it rusts.
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Researchers used radio echo sounding to detect the saltwater's path. They discovered that the water had taken close to 1.5 million years to finally reach Blood Falls as it made its way through fissures and channels within the glacier.
Water would normally freeze under such extreme cold conditions, but researchers say a combination of the heat given out during the freezing process and the lower freezing temperature of salt water allowed the lake's water to keep its form. The brine scrapes iron from the bedrock as it seeps through the ice to give it the colour red.
To know more about the scientific process in detail, read the full research published in the Cambridge Journal.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mystery-antarcticas-blood-falls-solved-100-years-133144660.html
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