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river of blooooooood!

ok, not really, but this looks totally cool:

according to atlas obscura:

Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

tags: science

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 3:33pm and is filed under i must retire to my nerdery, look over here!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. | tweet

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