On a frozen continent covered in pristine ice the last thing one would expect to see would be brown colors that break with the whitish harmony of the landscape, but right in the heart of the Taylor glacier lives a strange bloody waterfall from which emanate reddish waters that live up to their name.
The Bloody Waterfalls of Antarctica
In 1911, a British expedition to Antarctica got a huge surprise when they found a glacier that literally seemed to bleed to death. Since then, the bloody waterfalls, as they are called today, have been in the sights of scientists trying to discover what causes their blood-colored waters, and they have not had much success until now that the chemical composition of the strange liquid has been discovered.
Using a variety of analytical equipment, the researchers discovered some surprises that helped to better explain the iconic reddish hue. “As soon as I looked at the microscope images, I noticed that there were these little nanospheres, and they were rich in iron,” explains materials scientist Ken Livi of Johns Hopkins University.
The particles that make up the bloody cascades come from ancient microbes and are so small that they are one-hundredth the size of human red blood cells. Although small, they are extremely abundant in the meltwater of the Taylor Glacier, named after the British scientist Thomas Griffith Taylor, who first noticed the Bloody Waterfalls in the 1910-1913 expedition.
The most current research has found that the nanospheres are composed of a wide chemical variety ranging from iron, silicon, calcium, aluminum, and sodium. It is precisely the richness in their composition that turns salty subglacial water red when it slides off the glacier tongue and encounters a world of oxygen, sunlight, and heat.
“To be a mineral, the atoms must be organized in a very specific crystalline structure,” Livi explains. However, “these nanospheres are not crystalline, so the methods previously used to examine solids failed to detect them.”
Still Unable to Detect Life on Other Planets
The Taylor Glacier in Antarctica is a rich ecosystem, although the life harbored there is not visible to the naked eye. An ancient microbial community lies hundreds of meters under the ice and has evolved in isolation for millennia and possibly millions of years.
The unveiled secret of the bloody cascades suggests that we are not so easily able to detect the presence of life even on our own planet. So astrobiologists may not be able to detect the presence of microorganisms on planets like Mars because rovers may not have the technology to detect them.
“Our work has revealed that the analysis performed by rovers is incomplete in determining the true nature of environmental materials on planetary surfaces,” Livi says. “This is especially true for colder planets such as Mars, where the materials formed may be nanometer-sized and non-crystalline. Consequently, our methods for identifying these materials are inadequate,” he concludes.
This story was written in Spanish by Alejandra Martínez in Ecoosfera
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