In Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, a glacier has been leaking blood-red water for more than a century. When geologist Griffith Taylor first saw Blood Falls in 1911, he thought red algae were responsible. He was wrong. What scientists eventually found was far stranger: hypersaline water moving through a glacier cold enough to be frozen solid, microorganisms surviving without sunlight or oxygen, and evidence that the water may be a remnant of an ancient sea trapped beneath the ice for more than a million years. And even the famous red colour turned out not to be quite what scientists thought. In this episode of Reality Is Strange, we follow more than a century of research into Blood Falls — from its discovery to the latest evidence about the hidden system beneath Taylor Glacier. Because sometimes explaining a mystery doesn't make it less strange. It makes it stranger. Follow Reality Is Strange for more verified phenomena that get stranger the closer you look.

Blood Falls: The Ancient Ocean Beneath Antarctica

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