Mystery of Antarctic blood falls finally solved by researchers

After years and years of research, scientists have finally managed to solve the mystery of the “Blood Falls”, waterfalls of blood that flow down a huge glacier.

The mysterious blood falls in Antarctica

In Antarctica, scientists are facing a very strange phenomenon. Strange waterfalls of blood called “Blood Falls” flow along the Taylor Glacier. A still unexplained phenomenon that has intrigued the scientific world since its discovery in 1911, during the Terra Nova expedition.

However, it is not really blood, but clear water that flows from its source and gradually takes on the color of hemoglobin. Unexplained for many years, the “Blood Falls” have finally revealed their secrets.A team of researchers led by Ken J. T. Livi of Johns Hopkins University recently published a groundbreaking study in the journal Astronomy and Space Science.

A Major Breakthrough in Understanding Extraterrestrial Life

The researchers were able to analyze the composition of the water using ultra-powerful electron microscopes. They found a multitude of nanospheres, nanoparticles a hundred times smaller than a red blood cell.

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“As soon as I looked at the images under the microscope, I noticed that there were these little nanospheres, that they were rich in iron, that they contained many different elements in addition to iron – silicon, calcium, aluminum, sodium – and they all varied,” the team explains. 

Indeed, these ferrous nanospheres oxidize rapidly upon contact with air, giving the water its characteristic red hue.Their origin is just as fascinating, they come from ancestral microbes present in the meltwater of the glacier.

Beyond having solved the mysteries of the Taylor Glacier, this study allows a major advance in the understanding of extraterrestrial life. The bacterial strains present under the Taylor Glacier for millennia could serve as a model for understanding how life could develop in extreme environments such as on Mars for example. “With the advent of the Perseverance rover missions to Mars, there was an interest in trying to analyze the solids that came out of the waters of “Blood Falls” as if it were a Martian landing site,” the researchers emphasize.