The Oozing Blood Falls of Antarctica Are Sure to Give You Goosebumps

As you slowly make your way through the Dry Valleys of McMurdo in Antarctica, battling the relentless katabatic wind, you suddenly feel your stomach squirm and your hands shoot up to stifle the scream escaping your half-frozen lungs. The vision that grips you is beyond a reasonable doubt, a gush of blood, lots of blood!

A five-storey tall, blood-red waterfall pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier, oozing away menacingly like a scene straight out of a horror movie. No, your eyes do not deceive you. And no, this has nothing to do with Game of Thrones either. The vision you see are the spectacular Blood Falls of Antarctica.

Discovered in 1911 by Australian explorer and geologist Griffith Taylor, this waterfall had scientists in a tizzy for a long time. There were some schools of thought which believed the red colour came from algae but the true nature of these mysterious falls was discovered in 2009. After extensive study of the McMurdo Dry Valley region, which is one of the coldest and most inhospitable places on Earth, Geomicrobiologist Jill Mikucki published this widely accepted interpretation.  

Nearly two million years ago, a small body of water containing an ancient community of microbes was sealed beneath the Taylor Glacier forming a natural time capsule. Over the course of these two million years, the microbes evolved independently from the rest of the world with no light or free oxygen, trapped under a thick layer of ice. The very high salinity and rich iron content gave this trapped lake its characteristic red colour and a fissure in the glacier allowed the sub-glacial lake to slowly flow out into Lake Bonney.

Thinking of a visit?

The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a series of parallel valleys between the Ross Sea and the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Travel to Ross Sea is ship-based with small boat or helicopters landing for a few hours at a time in the valleys. Since 1995, the Taylor Valley has been opened for tourism and travellers have visited the region via helicopters. The area is part of VISTA (Antarctica New Zealand’s Ross Sea region visitor site assessment and monitoring programme) and tours are largely based on visual observation and photography. Interested? Visit the official website for McMurdo Dry Valleys for a list of expeditions going to Antarctica in the next year.

Just imagine the hair-raising view you will experience as you witness this amazing natural phenomenon. These spectacular falls prove the great diversity of the earth’s ecology and also the fact that life can exist in the most extreme conditions.

So, do you think it is time to plan an extreme adventure? I do!