It does exist... but where...???
Here's one of those stories that I just have to share. The story of Blood Falls and the creatures that live there... it is almost beyond belief.
Microbes that "breath" iron and metabolize sulfates... an ecosystem we've never observed anywhere else on earth.
Blood Falls!! Found at the foot of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica.
Here's a short excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:
Blood Falls is an outflow of an
iron oxide-tainted
plume of saltwater, flowing from the tongue of
Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of
West Lake Bonney in the
Taylor Valley of the
McMurdo Dry Valleys in
Victoria Land,
East Antarctica.
Iron-rich hypersaline water sporadically emerges from small fissures
in the ice cascades. The saltwater source is a subglacial pool of
unknown size overlain by about 400 metres (1,300 ft) of ice several
kilometers from its tiny outlet at Blood Falls.
The reddish deposit was found in 1911 by the Australian geologist
Griffith Taylor, who first explored the valley that bears his name.
[1] The Antarctica pioneers first attributed the red color to
red algae, but later it was proven to be due to iron oxides.
Chemical and microbial analyses both indicate that a rare subglacial
ecosystem of
autotrophic bacteria developed that metabolizes
sulfate and
ferric ions.
[3][4] According to
geomicrobiologist Jill Mikucki at the
University of Tennessee, water samples from Blood Falls contained at least 17 different types of microbes, and almost no oxygen.
[3] An explanation may be that the microbes use sulfate as a
catalyst to respire with ferric ions and metabolize the trace levels of
organic matter trapped with them. Such a metabolic process had never before been observed in nature.
Curiosity.com recently published a
good article:
https://curiosity.com/topics/blood-falls-is-a-scarlet-oddity-in-an-antarctic-glacier-curiosity?utm_campaign=daily-digest&utm_source=sendgrid&utm_medium=email
