For over a century, scientists have been puzzling over a mysterious, blood-red liquid that's been seeping out of a glacier in Antarctica.
The weird site, later dubbed "Blood Falls," has confounded researchers. But now, a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins may have shed new light on the strange discharge.
They took samples of the red liquid and examined them under a highly specialized transmission electron microscope — and found something surprising, which could even have implications for our search for alien life on other planets.
"As soon as I looked at the microscope images, I noticed that there were these little nanospheres and they were iron-rich, and they have lots of different elements in them besides iron — silicon, calcium, aluminum, sodium — and they all varied," said Ken Livi, a research scientist and coauthor of a new paper about the glacier published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, in a statement.
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