Strange Nature | Blood Falls: Death and Unlikely Life in Antarctica
1909. British Royal Navy officer and explorer, Captain Robert Falcon Scott receives word that Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition has narrowly missed being the first to reach the South Pole. He was turned away less than 100 miles from the coveted destination. To get that close, he had setup a base in McMurdo Sound. Captain Scott was incensed. He had, on the Discovery Expedition just a few years earlier, claimed the McMurdo Sound as his own “field of work”, and Shackleton’s use of the area was in breach of an understanding the two men had reached.
Scott knew other teams were gearing up. One from Japan, an Australasian team, and most concerning, his Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen, would all be sailing south. So Scott began planning his own expedition. One that would ensure he would be the first to stand at the southernmost point on earth.
While these trips may have been fueled by ego, they were largely financed by government for scientific discovery. And, well, ego.
In fact, in Captain Scott’s own words, "The main objective of this expedition is to reach the South Pole, and to secure for the British Empire the honour of this achievement."
However, Chief Scientist Edward Wilson disagreed, saying, "No one can say that it will have only been a Pole-hunt ... We want the scientific work to make the bagging of the Pole merely an item in the results."
So, from a pool of 8000 applicants, Captain Scott took along an experienced team of 65 officers and scientists, and the Terra Nova expedition set sail on the 15th of June, 1910.
A year of bad weather and bad luck lay ahead. At one point, at a particularly dire time, a party from the Terra Nova expedition encounters the rival Amundsen’s camp. He graciously offers to help, but they refuse. Upon learning of his rivals offer of assistance, Scott’s first reaction was to go “have it out” with Amundsen, but cooler heads prevailed, and the expedition continued forward.
On the 17th of January, 1912, over 18 months after setting sail, Captain Scott and four of his men reach the South Pole, only to find a tent with a black flag flying above it. Inside is a letter to the King of Norway, written by Roald Amundsen, who had beaten them by over a month. Adding insult to injury, a separate note asked Captain Scott to please deliver the letter himself.
After planting their own flag, Scotts party turned toward home, writing in his journal, "Now for a desperate struggle to get the news through first. I wonder if we can do it."
They couldn’t. With temperatures dropping rapidly, a missed meeting spot, and the men getting frostbite, their pace slowed. On the 20th of March, the team was stopped by a blizzard. On the 29th of March, Scott wrote, “Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. Last entry. For God's sake look after our people.”
It was indeed the final entry in Scott’s journal. None of the five men made it out alive.
But we know - we always knew - what caused these deaths. More than just bad luck and being ill prepared, it was ego. The desire of men to conquer the natural world. How many men have taken their last breath simply because they wanted so badly to be the first?
No, that was no mystery. But miles away, the team’s Senior Geologist, Thomas Griffith Taylor, had been exploring a valley later named for him, and had discovered something truly mysterious. 5 stories high and slowly seeping from the tongue of the glacier onto the frozen surface of Lake Bonney, was something strange. A thick, dark red liquid. A blood fall.
As if it wasn’t mysterious enough that here, where temperatures regularly reached 30 degrees below zero, there was still liquid flowing - it looked like it could be blood. Dark red and oozing from the edge of the glacier, staining the surrounding ice and snow.
Our geologist, Thomas Griffith Taylor, knew that it wasn't blood. He is a scientist, afterall. And yes, it’s water - but what gave it this distinct color, and how did it remain liquid enough to continue flowing from beneath a glacier into well below freezing temperatures?
Thomas hypothesized that the color must come from a red algae. And he knew that it must be a high salt content that kept it flowing, but then where was it coming from? It couldn’t somehow be glacier melt - that would be fresh water.
He was part right, part wrong. And it would take over 100 years to completely (we think) unravel the mystery.
See, in these particular valleys - the McMurdo Dry Valleys - strangely, there isn’t much snow other than on the glacier itself. The wind is so strong that any falling snow is blown clear of the valleys, leaving the ground cracked and bare. So if you look at an aerial view of the area, surrounded by an all white landscape are long, bare brown fingers reaching out toward the Ross Sea and the McMurdo Sound. So barren, that when Captain Robert Scott first discovered them, he referred to it as “the valley of the dead.”
But they are far from that. In fact, this area of Antarctica is of particular interest to scientists because it exists right on the edge of the possibility of life, and might just be the key to understanding how life could exist on Mars and other frozen planets.
If you were to pick up a handful of soil almost anywhere in the world that humans live - you’re almost certain to have in your hand, a nematode or two. Likely more. Nematodes are tiny unsegmented worms, and are amongst the most abundant animals on earth. There are over 20,000 named species. Who gives all of these things names, anyway? Is there a baby name book for Nematodes somewhere? Scientists believe only a small proportion of them have even been discovered.
But in the Taylor Valley, where Blood Falls seeps from it’s glacier, there are three. Three species of nematode. And they are often freeze dried by the harsh frozen desert environment, and blown about by the wind.
But these tiny freeze dried organisms aren’t dead. They are in a state of suspended animation. You drop them in water, and they are right back to wriggling little living nematodes.
And they may not be the strangest thing here.
We’ve had a lot of time since 1911 to try and figure out what’s going on with Blood Falls. Why it’s red, where the water is coming from, what causes it to flow sometimes and not others. Starting in the 60’s scientists began answering these questions, and just recently, have almost unraveled the entire mystery - as well as a few new ones that have popped up.
When he discovered it, Taylor made some great educated guesses, like his theory that algae must be the reason for the red color. He was wrong. Tests of the water proved the color to be due to iron. The glacier has scraped along on the underlying rock and picked up iron as it went. And just as iron does when exposed to the elements - our waterfall is rusting.
And Taylor didn’t have the benefit of being able to fly a helicopter with a massive electromagnetic sensor dangling beneath it over the entire area to map what’s under the frozen tundra.
Because if he had been able to do that, he might have seen what scientists did in 2015 when they flew their giant sensor around for two weeks and found a massive salty aquifer beneath the glacier, connecting what they previously believed to be isolated lakes.
What they now believe is that somewhere between 1.5 and 4 million years ago, this glacier slid into its current location, trapping beneath it this briny lake. While the average salinity - or level of saltiness - of the world's oceans is around 3.5%, the salinity of this aquifer is around 40%, making it one of the saltiest bodies of water on earth. And when the lake was covered by ice, so too were the microbes that lived in it. And now, millions of years later, beneath 400 meters of ice, with no sunlight or oxygen, those microbes are still alive. And thriving.
New. Mystery.
And recently, microbiologist Jill Mikucki from Harvard University and now with the University of Tennessee might have cracked the code on how these microbes have continued living for millions of years in one of the most harsh environments on the planet.
And here’s where we get super nerdy.
It took her several years just to get a sample of the briny water 400m below the glacier, but tests of that water showed that It's rich in sulfate ions, which many bacteria can use as an energy source - effectively breaking the ions open in a chemical reaction to derive oxygen from them.
However, she found no trace of the usual byproducts - sulfides - that would chemically prove the breaking apart of these sulfate ions.
So she came up with a hypothesis. The bacteria must have some way of recycling their energy source. And it seems she’s right. Mikucki suggests that they do so through a chemical reaction which reduces sulfate to sulfite, rather than the sulfide they expected. The sulphite then reacts with iron in the water, and is oxidized back into sulfate, replenishing their original energy supply. And they’ve been doing this for millions of years, in their own ecosystem, completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Not all of the mysteries are solved. The flow of Blood Falls is unpredictable, and was only recently caught on camera. We still aren’t completely sure how or why the water makes its way up through the fissures in the glacier. Which is just as well, since I’m sure those scientists camped in a place that Captain Scott called “The Valley of the Dead” need things to ponder in their time away from continuing to eagerly study the microbes in that subglacial aquifer. They hope to reveal the secrets of how life might be supported in other harsh environments - within our solar system there are seven bodies that are believed to harbor sub-cryospheric oceans that could possibly sustain similar life. Besides Mars and Pluto, there’s Titan and Enceladus (two of Saturn’s moons) and Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons), where scientists will someday have a new place to hunt for million year old super survivor microbes.
Links:
Music used in this episode:
Kvelden Trapp, Gra Landsby, Crem Valle, Csjtl, and Kovd by Fjell from Blue Dot Sessions
