Antarctica is Earth’s southernmost continent where the geographic South Pole is located. The frozen desert is home to some 1,000 scientists who live in the blistering conditions that reach -90C at times, as they attempt to understand more about the history of Earth. In 1911, Australian geologist Griffin Taylor was left mesmerised after discovering a flow or red saltwater from the tongue of a glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in East Antarctica.
The phenomenon was first attributed to red algae, but last year scientists finally cracked the mystery once and for all.
Steve Martin, a historian in the icy continent told Motherboard: “It’s unearthly, it’s unreal.
“So when [explorer] Griffith Taylor and his friends saw the blood falls flowing red out of the end of the Taylor Glacier, they must have thought it was just another incredible oddity in a very strange part of the world.
“That first discovery is leading us on a track of further discovery and further explanation.
“Antarctica still has not yielded up all her secrets.”
A team of scientists discovered the red tinge was actually due to the high iron content that turned the water bloody red.
However, Erin Pettit, one of the scientists who worked on the mystery, admitted that did not solve everything.
She said: “We did not know where the brine came from.
“We didn’t know how it made its way through the glacier.
“If [the brine] started at the base of the glacier, it should have continued to flow at the base.”
Instead, the team discovered the brine squirted out the top of the glacier and flowed down over the edge, eventually joining a nearby lake.
To figure out how it formed, Dr Pettit and her team trekked across the glacier and took measurements using a radio-wave sensor.
The instrument sends radio pulses into the ice, which move freely through the frozen glacier.
They eventually identified that the immense pressure of the ice squeezed the water trapped in an ancient, underground lake below up through the glacier
Dr Petit added: “It was pretty powerful, pressurise brine in that conduit.
“Even though it’s not always squirting out the top of the glacier, it’s always sitting within the ice there as a pressurised, slushy ice mess.”
The team published their findings and were able to confirm them when a drilling team visited the region this year.
By using the map Pettit and her team had created, the drilling crew located where the underground source should be and got to work. Sure enough, red brine squirted up around the drill.
