The mystery of the Antarctic “bloody waterfall” has been solved

The Johns Hopkins Institute has discovered why the “bloody waterfall” toppling from the foot of Antarctica’s Taylor Glacier has a red colour.

At the beginning of the last century, Thomas Griffith Taylor, who discovered the waterfall, hypothesised that it owed its strange colour to algae. But then science discovered that it was not algae, but iron salts oxidised in the atmosphere.

In a new study it was proved that the streams of the waterfall and indeed contains iron, but it has a very unexpected form, namely nanospheres, the size of which is one hundred times smaller than that of human red blood cells.