Antarctica’s “Blood Falls”

Image via Wikipedia

Talk about unnerving. Via Mental Floss:

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.

You can read more here.