That glacier-born waterfall isn’t gushing actual blood so it is all “oooo, ahhhh” instead of “someone get an exorcist”. The lowdown on Blood Falls, courtesy of Atlas Obscura:
This five-story, blood-red waterfall pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. When geologists first discovered the frozen waterfall in 1911, they thought the red color came from algae, but its true nature turned out to be much more spectacular.
Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially 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 subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.
There’s another “bloody” body of water located in a less frigid clime. Spain’s Rio Tinto begins in the Sierra Morena mountains and ends in the Gulf of Cádiz. It has been a mining hot spot since ancient times and the river has become highly acidic due to this activity. And, as the color hints, the water is extremely rich in iron.
(h/t: Web Ecoist)
