Motherboard

That’s a picture of the five story waterfall in Antarctica that spews blood-red water. (Get a high-res version here.) Despite being discovered 100 years ago, researchers still don’t know exactly how “Blood Falls,” as it’s appropriately titled, came to be. Only recently did scientists begin snooping around the waters beneath Taylor’s glacier that feed Blood Falls, and what they’re finding is pretty nuts.

The water under Taylor’s glacier hosts at least 17 different microorganisms that live without oxygen, air, or light in an extremely salty, ferrous brine. In fact, it’s the high iron content that turns the water red when it hits air, just like blood. So why is this a big discovery? Because it means everything we think we know about “the building blocks of life” is garbage. From webecoist:

“The working theory is that the organisms evolved to use sulfate to “breathe” the ferric iron, and lived on the very small amounts of organic matter that were trapped in the subglacial pocket with them millions of years ago. The discovery is significant because similar conditions are present on some extraterrestrial bodies; knowing that such life forms exist here on Earth make it easier to believe that somewhere out there in space, there could be similar colonies of microbes surviving at extreme temperatures with no oxygen and no light.”

That’s right, aliens. Didn’t see that coming, did you?