Blood Falls in Antarctica

by wordlesstech team

Blood Falls seeps from the end of the Taylor Glacier into Lake Bonney in the Antarctic. Scientists believe a buried saltwater reservoir is partly responsible for the discoloration, which is a form of reduced iron. The tent at left provides a sense of scale for just how big the phenomenon is. Photo by Peter Rejcek, courtesy of the National Science Foundation, Wikimedia Commons

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Blood Falls is an outflow of an iron oxide-tainted plume of saltwater, occurring at the tongue of the Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land, East Antarctica.

Iron-rich hypersaline water sporadically emerges from small fissures in the ice cascades. The saltwater source is a subglacial pool of unknown size overlain by about 400 meters of ice at several kilometers from its tiny outlet at Blood Falls.