Blood Falls in Antarctica & Life Calls on Europa, page 1

In Antarctica, a vivid red stains the landscape like a gaping wound in a Snow Queen's breast. The scarlet stain seeps and pours down the glacier lending at a gruesome quality...

The red stain is the result of iron and salt precipitate slowly escaping from an isolated lake that was created during the Pliocene Epoch, up to an incredible 5 million years ago.

Within this lake are microbial lifeforms that exist without anything we assume to be the necessities of life. It's essentially a time capsule of strange life that can be compared to the our early primordial oceans.

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."

Blood Falls





The outlet for this blood red water is just right to allow water to leave without any outside influences in. It keeps the ecosystem inside the lake in splendid isolation. We can't yet explore this mysterious lake without destroying the environment within. Any probe will need to be 100% clean of life...bacteria etc.

These toughass little critters lend hope to the dreams of discovering life on other worlds. Worlds like Jupiter's Europa (Oceans of Europa: Will the Solar Systems' 1st Extraterrestrial Life be Found There? ) and the current favourite Saturn's Enceladus. Both of these moons are believed to have oceans beneath their icy surfaces. Enceladus has been imaged spewing water into the solar wind...



Jets On Saturn's Moon Enceladus Not Geysers From Underground Ocean, One Group Of Researchers Say... the jury is still out on the geysers, but there's consensus about the oceans.

Our extremophiles in their small alien world beneath the polar ice, may well be part of a larger family that spans three worlds or more...How we begin to explore these 'time-capsules' may ultimately determine how we'll explore the speculative oceans of Europa.

source

reply to post by Sinter Klaas

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Explore and then explore some more is the way forward

A guy called Bill Stone is leading the way forward here. He's been testing a submersible in the waters that Bleeding Falls runs into. His ultimate aim is to explore the oceans of Europa...



News: NASA Approves ENDURANCE Upgrade Funding for 2009 Antarctica Field Season

This is the Endurance...not life size



This video sets out his plans to set up a moon base in Shackleton Crater. From there...he hopes to launch a probe to search for life in the Europa oceans. I love his ambition and playing 'Born to be Wild' over an animation of extraterrestrial exploration is magic....

reply to post by Kandinsky

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Maybe this is the same as that red blood rain in India:

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by kiwifoot

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Hiya Kiwi and thanks for the kind words...

Do you think it's at all possible that in those 2 million years various other forms of life has evolved? EDIT to add what I mean is, some kind of weird and wonderful life form!!

Secondly, I wonder if there's anything nasty in there (microbes/viruses etc) that could possibly survive outside of their sealed environment and damage our ecosystem when released.

From what I've read, the environment is likely fairly static. Life should be limited to very basic organisms....bacteria etc. There shouldn't be enough ecology to develop complex organisms. That's the science talking. It's more fun to envisage silent predators gliding through the oily black confines in search of prey....bio-luminescent lures writhing around long, sharp teeth.

I assume that no viruses or infectious bacteria could relate to us. The outflow isn't new and the first image shows a tent in the vicinity of the Blood Falls. The area has been studied since 1912...some short years before the 1918 Flu pandemic

Just joking...still, we won't know until we're able to get in there and take samples without polluting the eco-system. For all the popular criticisms of science, many do have respect for nature and hold it in great regard.

If a pharamcorp thought a possible cure for something could be found down there...I guess we'd be pulling on wetsuits and grabbing ice-picks and dynamite.

EDIT to add I was mistaken about the image with a tent. It's one I didn't upload. Here's one that provides a better example...



The X-Files could have written a two-parter for this location...

[edit on 7-3-2010 by Kandinsky]

reply to post by Ikema been my thoughts for years now! There could be something that we never have been exposed to and it may kill us all.

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