[meteorite-list] The Ancient Secrets of a 'Bleeding' Glacier Are Finally Being Revealed

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2015 14:26:48 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201503122126.t2CLQmUe023530_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://gizmodo.com/the-ancient-secrets-of-a-bleeding-glacier-are-finally-1691114510

The Ancient Secrets of a "Bleeding" Glacier Are Finally Being Revealed
By Sarah Zhang
Gizmodo
March 12, 2015

Against vast whiteness of Antarctica, Blood Falls bleeds a deep dramatic
red. The color comes from iron-rich ancient seawater trapped under the
ice for 2 million years. For the first time, scientists have been able
to take a sample from deep under the ice.

The five-story tall Blood Falls was first discovered in 1911. In 2004,
a team including Jill Mikucki, a microbiologist now at the University
of Tennessee Knoxville, sampled the microbial life at the mouth of the
falls. Because the microbes oozing out normally live in dark, oxygen-less,
and extremely salt places, Blood Falls is a unique place to study extremophiles
outside of their inaccessible natural habitat.

Mikucki went on to publish her work in Science, but there was still a
problem. Exposure to the light and oxygen at the mouth of the falls could
skew the results. This winter (or summer in Antarctica), she returned
with a team and the IceMole, which the Antarctic Sun describes:

The IceMole is a long rectangular metal box with a copper head and ice
screw at one end capable of melting its way through ice - but not just
straight down like a conventional electro-thermal drill. Differential
heating at the tip allows IceMole to change directions. It looks a bit
like a very large hypodermic needle poised to inoculate a glacier.

Using the IceMole, Mikucki's team directly sampled a major vein that leads
from the buried brine reservoir to the falls. (The reservoir itself is
even further up the glacier and buried below even more ice, making it
a considerable challenge.) To locate the liquid veins and guide the IceMole,
the team used thermometers placed in boreholes in the ice.

The team will be analyzing these new, uncontaminated samples for chemical
content and microbial life. Blood Falls is pretty much unlike any other
place on Earth, so the extremophiles that live in it, isolated for millions
of years, are likely to be pretty unique, too.
Received on Thu 12 Mar 2015 05:26:48 PM PDT