By: Justin Zhao

There are many beautiful waterfalls worldwide, but none are as strange as Antartica’sBlood Falls. This waterfall, which spurts red water out of the middle of the Tayor Glacier, flows into Lake Bonney. Recently, a group of researchers from Ohio State University discovered its source and why the water is red.

Australian geologist Griffith Taylor was the first to discover Blood Falls, he reasoned that the water’s color came from red algae. Later studies show that the water is filled with iron from a lake buried under the Taylor Glacier.

However, when the team from Ohio came to test for iron levels, they found mostly tiny traces of iron clumped in nanoparticles a hundred times smaller than the human red blood cell.

Ken Livi is the co-author of this study.

“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,” Livi said.

For atoms to be a mineral, atoms must be arranged in a very specific structure. The nanoparticles were not minerals. The researchers said that the lake had been isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years and is a key to understanding if other planets had life.

“Our work has revealed that the analysis conducted by rover vehicles is incomplete in determining the true nature of environmental materials on planet surfaces,” Livi said. “This is true for colder planets like Mars, where the place mostly nanoparticles of rust.