Blood Falls
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In a study published this week in the Journal of Glaciology , researchers including Mikucki report new information on the intriguing natural phenomenon's plumbing: Badgeley conducted the research while she was an undergrad at Colorado College, working with the University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Erin Pettit and her team. This is an unusual feature, and there are very few things like it. So it wasn't obvious how you got the brine from below the glacier up to the surface. For starters, the glacier wasn't supposed to have liquid water running through it at all.
Salt lowers water's freezing point, so brine stays sloshy for longer. She and her colleagues found that the brine actually warms itself up as it freezes.
Blood Falls
Sounds, wacky, sure, but we are talking about the Blood Falls. Here's how that works: In the case of the brine flowing through Taylor Glacier, the heat given off by the brine that does freeze is enough to keep the rest of it flowing.
The signature of that heat helped Badgeley and her team track down the water's path: That told them about the glacier's innards, and their results showed that an area inside was particularly warm and liquidy. To confirm that there was indeed a reservoir of brine there, researchers used a robot called IceMole which, quite coincidentally, we just wrote about. IceMole melts and drills its way through ice to sample whatever lies beneath—a skill scientists hope will help us sniff out life on icy worlds like Europa , where microbe-filled oceans might flow under thick layers of ice.
Blood Falls makes a perfect testing ground for such probe, and in this case IceMole's trial run had the added benefit of confirming salty, liquid water right where Badgeley and her colleagues expected to find it. Blood Falls has spilled a lot of its secrets at this point.
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Salty, rusty brine sits under the glacier, staying warm thanks to some counter-intuitive chemistry. Crevasses open up at the glacier's base, allowing pressurized brine to shoot upward. If a surface crack happens to open up and intersect with these cracks below, the blood-colored liquid has a path to ooze right on out into the open.
In December , scientists and engineers led by Mikucki returned to Taylor Glacier and used a probe called IceMole , designed by a German collaboration, to melt into the glacier and directly sample the salty water brine that feeds Blood Falls.
Researchers solve the century-old mystery of Blood Falls
From these samples, scientists isolated and characterized a type of bacteria capable of growing in salty water halophilic , that thrives in the cold psychrophile , and is heterotrophic , which they assigned to the genus Marinobacter. Two gene clusters are related to the production of aryl polyenes , which function as antioxidants that protect the bacteria from reactive oxygen species. According to Mikucki et al.
It explains how other microorganisms could have survived when the Earth according to the Snowball Earth hypothesis was entirely frozen over. Ice-covered oceans might have been the only refugia for microbial ecosystems when the Earth apparently was covered by glaciers at tropical latitudes during the Proterozoic eon about to million years ago. This unusual place offers scientists a unique opportunity to study deep subsurface microbial life in extreme conditions without the need to drill deep boreholes in the polar ice cap , with the associated contamination risk of a fragile and still-intact environment.
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The study of harsh environments on Earth is useful to understand the range of conditions to which life can adapt and to advance assessment of the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system, in places such as Mars or Europa , an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. Scientists of the NASA Astrobiology Institute speculate that these worlds could contain subglacial liquid water environments favourable to hosting elementary forms of life, which would be better protected at depth from ultraviolet and cosmic radiation than on the surface.
Blood Falls is an outflow of an iron oxide-tainted plume of saltwater, flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney. This five-story, blood-red waterfall pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. The existence of the Blood Falls ecosystem shows that life can exist in the most extreme conditions on Earth. Even if it doesn’t confirm the existence of.
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