The Blood Falls are a slow-weeping wound on face of a
glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys – a rusty column of water saturated with
sulfur and iron emanating from a deep laceration in the ice, bubbling up from a
prehistoric lake some four hundred metres below. Harvard scientists
recently discovered that the hallucinogenic plume delivers emissaries from primoridial ooze; a
bacteria colony that has been isolated without oxygen, light or heat for more
than one and a half million years; microbes that have evolved independently of
the rest of our living planet, whose metabolisms do not require photosynthesis
but live off the acrid minerals themselves – a seeming portent of what life
might be like on Mars.
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