Antarctica's "Blood Falls"

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There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It's one of the continent's strangest features, and it's located in one of the continent's strangest places -- the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world's harshest deserts.

Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott's ill-fated expedition team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar ice caps of Mars and Europa.