Blood Falls, a mysterious, red-colored waterfall that flows from the edge of an Antarctic glacier, has finally revealed some of its biological secrets, more than a century after its discovery.
A research team led by Yale University, the University of California at San Diego, and the J. Craig Venter Institute in California has found a community of complex microbes at the foot of the Taylor Glacier, an ice sheet in the Victoria Land region of eastern Antarctica. The microbial discovery has implications for the resilience of complex cells under extreme environmental conditions, and for the mechanisms by which microbial life adapted to climate change in the distant past.
"This potentially brings us to a new understanding of microbial resilience," said Angela Zoumplis, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and first author of a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. "It tells us something very exciting about how certain organisms can adapt to new conditions and persist in extraordinarily harsh environments."
