Blood Falls is a natural (Cannot
called supernatural) phenomenon, which is a liquid outflow at the snout of
Taylor Glacier in East Antarctica. Numerous glaciers have icy outflows, but few
of them are salty, and even fewer are red. Blood Falls is a typical continental
glacier, descending from a plateau on the Antarctic Ice Sheet about 54
kilometers away.
The Australian explorer &
geologists first discover frozen blood falls in 1911, which is now as “Blood
Falls” and initially they believed red color from algae. But the five story
blood red waterfalls pour very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica
McMurdo Dry Valleys. With the passage of time its true natural beauty turned
out to be more incredible.
It is thought that approximately
2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed underneath it a small body of
water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick
layer of ice, they’ve remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time
capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes
exist in a place with no light or free oxygen and little heat, and are
fundamentally the definition of "primordial ooze."
The trapped lake has very high
salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A
fissure in the glacier allows the sub glacial lake to flow out, forming the
falls without contaminating the ecosystem within. The existence of the Blood
Falls ecosystem indicates that life can exist in the most extreme conditions on
Earth.
However tempting to make the
connection, it does not prove, though, that life could exist on other planets
with same environments and related bodies of frozen water particularly Mars and
Jupiter's moon Europa as such life would have to arise from a completely
different chain of events. Even if it doesn't confirm the existence of
extraterrestrial life, Antarctica's Blood Falls is a wonder to behold both
visually and scientifically.
The irregular outflow of reddish
fluid let researchers explore the lake without drilling or endangering
contamination of the trapped lake itself. Researchers collected water samples
from Blood Falls over a period of six years. A lot of tests exposed that its
waters contained almost no oxygen and hosted a community of at least 17 different
types of microorganisms. How could they have survived for so long, with no
light or oxygen?
No comments:
Post a Comment