Their results appeared in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.
Mikucki, a University of Tennessee microbiologist who has been investigating the Taylor Glacier and Blood Falls for years. Livi worked on the project as part of a team that included experts at other institutions, including Jill A. "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. (Nanospheres are tiny round objects-100th the size of the average human red blood cell-with unique physical and chemical characteristics.) Using powerful transmission electron microscopes at Johns Hopkins' Materials Characterization and Processing facility, Ken Livi, a research scientist in the Whiting School's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, examined solids in samples of Blood Falls' water and found an abundance of tiny, iron-rich nanospheres that oxidize, turning the water seemingly gory. For more than a century, this phenomenon that Taylor dubbed "Blood Falls" has captured people's imaginations and remained a scientific mystery-until now.
During the infamous Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica in 1911, British geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor made a mysterious discovery at the rocky base of the glacier that now bears his name: a waterfall of what appeared to be blood.ĭischarged from beneath the ice at the glacier's tongue, the water emerges clear but then quickly turns crimson.
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