

Blood-like microbes spew out of Antarctic glacier - sharan
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/45981
Microbes isolated for a million years make quite an entrance.
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_delirium
A lot more details here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Falls>

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Jun8
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!

~~~
electromagnetic
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).

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yannis
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?

~~~
eru
> 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?

~~~
tkt
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.

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

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

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johnohara
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)

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DougWebb
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?

