A glacier that appears to bleed. A plume of rust-red saltwater seeps out of the snout of Taylor Glacier into the McMurdo Dry Valleys and stains the ice crimson. Griffith Taylor found it in 1911 and the first guess was red algae; it is iron oxide. The source is a pool of brine sealed under about 400 metres of ice, seawater trapped roughly five million years ago in the Miocene when advancing glaciers cut off a fjord. It has no oxygen and no light, and it is not sterile: at least seventeen kinds of microbe live down there, Marinobacter and others, cold-loving and salt-loving, making a living off sulfate and ferric iron. It is the closest thing on this planet to what life under the ice of Europa might look like. Victoria Land, East Antarctica.
Taylor Valley, Antarctica
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