Blood-like microbes spew out of Antarctic glacier | Hacker News Reader

Blood-like microbes spew out of Antarctic glacier

mentalfloss.com

48 pointssharan15 comments

Microbes isolated for a million years make quite an entrance.

A lot more details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Falls

You have to admire the balls of guys like Thomas Griffith Taylor, who discovered this place. I mean look at his picture on Wikipedia: the guy is walking around in Antarctica in less clothing then I normally wear in a Chicago winter. And no satellite phones or GPS to call for help either, if you get stuck or lost, game over. Wow!

I work out in the cold, and while it does appear he's wearing virtually nothing compared to what we usually wear in the present day, the quality of clothing plays a big factor.

I've sweated my ass off (literally dripping) at -15C with just a fleece sweatshirt on over a thin tshirt (literally less than 1/5th of an inch of material), but the slightest wind with that on draws all the protection from the cold away. Leathers provide a virtually impenetrable protection against wind, and a real fur below that would have provided great protection against cold. However I found that a simple summer wind breaker over the fleece sweatshirt was enough to get around in the winter <30 minutes outside without getting cold.

During my actual work periods (IE 8 hours) I typically go on the heavy side of clothing and with the heavy exercise I do I actually feel at risk of heatstroke at -10C. Considering these guys frequently had done military service, and often were actively in military service, they probably wore little clothing during travel for the same reason that they had to not only regulate heat loss but heat gain to form a balance between being freezing and boiling.

It's also worth noting that these expeditions were frequently performed during December, which is incidentally the height of summer in the southern hemisphere. Summer temperatures are between -15C and -35C, which is considerably more manageable than the winter temperatures of -40C to -70C. Note the freezing point of CO2 is -78C (not that at its pressure it would ever freeze in nature).

It is such a pity that there is no adequate research budgets for extremophiles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile This reminded me of a friend of mine in South Africa who once showed me photos of living organisms that they collected from rocks almost 2km deep - that owed their existence to uranium. Does anyone have any co-ordinates for the glacier mentioned above?

> This reminded me of a friend of mine in South Africa who once showed me photos of living organisms that they collected from rocks almost 2km deep - that owed their existence to uranium.

How? Did you they live off radiation?

I don't know anything about these microbes in particular, but some bacteria can use metals, even uranium, as electron acceptors for growth. Two well-studied examples are Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella oneidensis.

You can find some info here http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/2900/life-is-lonely-at-... D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. A lot of research at the time my friend was working was not published as some of these organisms could produce gold as a metabolic product. True alchemists!

It should be in the vicinity of

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=-77.733333,162.166667&...

A good book on bacteria living deep underground is 'The Deep Hot Biosphere' by Thomas Gold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#The_Deep_Hot_Biosph...

It's somewhat controversial, but it's a good read.

I have to wonder what people would have thought about this during biblical times.

AFAIK people still read the bible. You could probably still find out.

You are thinking of religions other than those based on the bible.

One of the goals of the bible was to get people to stop believing in other deities and to stop attributing natural events to mystical powers.

They would have thought it an act of God and branded anyone who said otherwise an evil lying heretic. People still do that today, for instance in the comments (15 pages worth) to this post about Blood Falls where the author chose to use the word evolve: http://www.good.is/post/science-rules-antarctic-glacier-has-...

Why is this weird? It's iron-oxide and saltwater. Here's iron-oxide and freshwater: http://www.quikrete.com/ProductLines/CementColor.asp

The same used to be said about oil bubbling on the surface in California and Texas. And there's probably an asteroid of pure gold floating around somewhere too.

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."

-- Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy)

If this red mixture is spewing out occasionally, and it's coming from the lake, how exactly is the bacteria colony in the lake "isolated for 1.5 million years"? It seems to me that there is potentially a path for flowing liquid connecting the lake to the front of the glacier. The alternative would be that the glacier occasionally picks up material from the top of the lake and slowly transports it as a separate mass to the front of the glacier where it gets released. Have radar studies of the glacier been done to determine its internal structure and the transport mechanism?

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