A wound-like gash that spurts red liquid out of a glacier has dumbfounded scientists since its discovery more than a century ago. It’s been 106 years since Australian geologist Griffith Taylor discovered the vivid red falls flowing from the glacier named after him, onto the icy Lake Bonney.
An Australian geologist stumbled upon the Antarctic waterfall in 1911 and put forward the theory that the “blood” was just water that had been stained by microscopic red algae. But it wasn’t until 2003 that it was decided the red color came from oxidized iron and water most likely draining from a 5 million-year-old saltwater lake.
A study from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Colorado College confirms the glacier has not only a lake underneath it but also a water system that has been flowing for a million years. In the study, they use radio echo sounding (RES) and hydraulic-potential modeling to map the englacial and subglacial pathways, respectively, which bring brine to the surface.
Lead researcher Jessica Badgeley from Colorado College said: “The salts in the brine made this discovery possible by amplifying contrast with the fresh glacier ice.”
“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 study co-author Christina Carr.
The reason it has never frozen, they say, is a perpetual hydraulic system that sees the heat energy released by water freezing, in turn melting the surrounding ice, which means that a supply of constantly flowing water must be running through to Blood Falls.
“Taylor Glacier is now the coldest known glacier to have persistently flowing water,” says Pettit.
“This study can bring us closer to understanding the coupled geochemical evolution of and microbial environment hosted by the brine,” they write.
Read the full study and findings published in the Journal of Glaciology.
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