In 1911, during the Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica, British geologist, Thomas Griffith Taylor, discovered a mysterious glacier, bleeding ‘crimson red’ drool from its tongue. For years, the researchers had not been able to figure out the reason of bleeding from the Blood Falls, one of the coldest and least habitable places in the world. However, now, scientists finally seem to have found out that the reason for the iconic red hue from Taylor Glacier’s rusty tongue was due to the presence of little ‘iron-rich nanospheres’.
Most intriguingly, the water beneath the glacier’s tongue was clear, however, it quickly turned crimson on the surface.
Kenneth Livi, a research scientist, examined the samples of solids taken from the water of the Blood Falls under powerful transmission electron microscopes at the Johns Hopkins’ Materials Characterisation and Processing facility, and found that the red colour is due to an abundance of tiny and iron-rich nanospheres that oxidise on coming into contact with air and not due to the presence of some minerals as previously concluded by researches. (Nanospheres are 100th the size of an average human red blood cell with unique physical and chemical characteristics.)
Livi worked on this project with Jill A. Mikucki, a microbiologist from the University of Tennessee, who also worked on the investigation of Taylor Glacier and Blood Falls for many years. Their results were published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences. It took almost a century to solve the mystery of Blood Falls because the nanospheres are amorphous materials which lack a crystalline structure. That’s why it eluded prior analytical methods looking for minerals as they are not technically minerals.
Understanding Antarctic Microbiology
According to Livi, understanding about Antarctic microbiology is necessary to understand the mystery of Blood Falls. For millions of years, microorganisms have been potentially existing underneath the saline waters of the Taylor Glacier. The ancient iron- and salt-rich waters under the glacier are host to strains of bacteria that may not have changed for millions of years. So, understanding the highly unusual environment and its life forms could let one understand about the life on other planets as well which have similar inhospitable environment.
These nanospheres were not only iron-rich but had lots of other different elements including silicon, calcium, aluminium, and sodium.
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