This Special Bleeding Glacier Is A Rare Phenomenon In Nature – You Have To See It

Should you ever find yourself in Antarctica, you may see a truly amazing and somewhat unsettling sight. It”s a five-story waterfall that gushes from a fissure into the Taylor Glacier, spilling down the rugged coast and into Antarctica”s Lake Bonney. Seems picturesque, no?

Really, it”s truly unforgettable…

Aptly named Blood Falls, this waterfall pours bright red water out of the stark, white glacier. Its shocking shade and gory appearance tend to be frightening, but obviously, this can ben”t actually bloodstream. Like bloodstream, though, its red color does originate from iron.

The liquid at Blood Falls is obviously iron-rich, hypersaline liquid that leaks out from a sodium lake beneath the glacier. The salt pond is obviously old seawater left-over through the Miocene Period.

Once the iron in the water hits the air, it oxidizes and essentially rusts. This is just what lends water the blood-red color you see spilling along the glacier. The reality that it will spill-over occasionally is ideal for researchers (despite looking quite ominous), given that it lets all of them learn the ancient liquid without the need to drill to the glacier to arrive at it.

Over time, they”ve found that the super-salty, super-cold pond houses about 17 different sorts of microorganisms, which have resided here for millennia without light or air. This provides researchers an idea of exactly how life originated about this planet, and just how it might survive on others.