There is a five-story, blood-red waterfall, dubbed Blood Falls, oozing slowly from the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valley.
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.
The existence of the Blood Falls ecosystem shows that life is indeed possible in the most extreme of conditions. Life could perhaps exist on other planets with similar environments and similar bodies of frozen water – notably Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa. But regardless of extraterrestrial life, the earth’s Blood Falls are a wonder to behold both visually, and scientifically.
- Atlas Obscura
The Dry Valleys are only accessible by helicopter from McMurdo Station (US), Scott Base (New Zealand) or a cruise ship in the Ross Sea.
Microbes, riiiiiiiiight. They have no idea what they’re dealing with…
It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
- H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness
Can anyone say Shoggoth. … Ok, we’ll work on that.
Those of us who are well versed in the writings of Lovecraft are left with a strange feeling that the Shoggoths have returned.
Created by the Elder Things as living construction equipment The Shoggoths, could take on any shape needed, making them very versatile within their aquatic environment. The Shoggoths built the underwater cities of their masters. Over millions of years of existence, some Shoggoths mutated and gained independent minds. They rebelled, although the Elder Things quelled their insurrection. The Elder Things, fully dependent on them for labor, could not exterminate them, so despite their masters’ wishes, the Shoggoth achieved the ability to survive on land.
So it’s not too far a stretch to believe one could survive under the ice flows of Antarctica. And with cruise ships in the Ross Sea and eco-scientists tent-camping right next to the thing…
And this isn’t the first reported sighting…
- Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow, Alaska – Forget vampires Barrow, you may have a Shoggoth in your own backyard, and it doesn’t care if it’s day or night.
- And how about that “Bloop” heard by the NOAA back in 1997?
I’m just saying.
