Scientists Intrigued by Glacier Bleeding Red Fluid
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Scientists Intrigued by Glacier Bleeding Red Fluid:
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.
[...] "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.
The existence of these mysterious nanospheres, which haven't been detected until now, runs counter to the prevailing theory that the blood-red liquid was caused by an abundance of minerals.
Minerals are crystalline in nature, while these nanospheres, which are 100 times smaller than red blood cells, aren't.
Their existence also sheds new light on the microorganisms and bacteria that have lived for "potentially millions of years underneath the saline waters of the Antarctic glacier," according to Livi.
Journal Reference:
Elizabeth C. Sklute, Jill A. Mikucki, M. Darby Dyar, et al. A Multi-Technique Analysis of Surface Materials From Blood Falls, Antarctica [open], Front. Astron. Space Sci., 30 May 2022 Volume 9 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2022.843174
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