Remember that scene from The Shining? The one where gallons of blood come hurtling down the hotel hallway. Haunting stuff. Yet also cinematically gorgeous, in a morbid, nightmarish way. Well as it turns out, nature has its own version of this iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror epic, only it’s in Antartica not Colorado and a deranged Jack Nicholson isn’t wreaking havoc with an axe.
The environmental anomaly, dubbed “blood falls,” lies at the end of Taylor Glacier, a heaving mass of ice on the North East tip of Antartica. And what makes this place stand out amidst the frigid barren wasteland is the crimson fluids flowing from its center. The redness is actually a brine, or a salty iron-rich liquid that, when mixed with oxygen, turns this blood red color.
And apart from being a horror aficionado’s natural-world wet dream, the falls bear some valuable scientific qualities. Researchers discovered that pools of the briny liquid flow at least three miles beneath the glacier’s surface. And it’s full of primordial microbes, which are capable of surviving in such harsh conditions. These are the same types of organisms that scientists believe might be living on Mars or under the frozen surfaces of Jupiters’ moons.
There you have it – alien life forms right here on earth, manifesting in a five-story waterfall of blood. Metallica should shoot a music video there…jus sayin’.
