OozeGOOD Blog > Patrick James on February 24, 2010 at 5:00 am PST
There is a five-story, blood-red waterfall pouring slowly from the
Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valley. Its back story, at
Atlas Obscura, is simply remarkable:
Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a
small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes.
Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever
since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently
of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat,
light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of "primordial
ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron,
which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier
allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without
contaminating the ecosystem within.
One takeaway here is that life is possible in extreme conditions. That
said, in the absence of ideal conditions, life can evolve without
begetting plants or birds or cuddly mammals or sentient beings who
write blogs on the internet; it just begets a glob of ooze.
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