You can't get blood from a stone... or can you?

Two years ago I visited Canyonlands in Utah and I  thought even the most hardened rock-hater could be moved to geologise over the spectacle. However, after recently seeing new images of Blood Falls in Antarctica I think I've found a new contender for my top Geological Wonder of the World, the one place where it seems you CAN get blood from stone.

Blood Falls, Antarctica

With such an unexpected and gory appearance, especially against the bleak icy landscape of Antarctica, I can't understand why Taylor Glacier is not mentioned more often. Especially when the striped red sands of Arizona's 'The Wave' (especially with the recent 127 Hours film just released) and the Grand Canyon are so well known, and the processes which formed them are considered general knowledge.   

The Wave in Arizona

Although it seems as if a miracle, and the Earth literally appears to be bleeding, the processes which formed Blood Falls are in fact well known.  It was originally thought that algae lived on the surface of the ice and caused the colouration but last year something more spectacular was discovered.

The glacier is actually underlain by a dank and salty lake with no oxygen, light or food source. The lake formed 2 million years ago when Snowball Earth events caused part of the Antarctic Ocean to become trapped and the brine concentrated to be three times as salty as normal seawater. Despite less-than-savoury conditions, there are still microbes living there (seventeen different types to be exact), which have been there since the lake formed and have learnt to 'eat' sulphates and to 'poop' out iron. It's as this waste iron rises 400m to the surface and reacts with oxygen to form the red rust colour that it stains the ice to look like blood.

Diagram by Zina Deretsky, ref: Science doi:10.1126/science.1167350

These microbes exist in such unfavourable conditions that they are one of the best and most easily accessible (scientists don't even need to drill through the ice to reach them) extremophiles for NASA and other astrobiology organisations to use in research to discovere how  places like Mars and Europa could support life. 

What's black and white and red all over?

A sunburnt Panda! Although neither of the two Giant Pandas moving to Edinburgh Zoo will have to worry about sunburn.

My little sisters favorite things in the whole world are Pandas. When she was little and asked where she wanted to go on family days out her answer was inevitably 'the zoo', and she would wile away hours in front of their cage talking to Ming-Ming (who was later sent away in disgrace after fighting with her mate).  Although, my sister isn’t the only person afflicted by Panda fever, everybody loves Pandas and the Sneezing Panda was one of the most watched videos on YouTube. So what is it that makes these animals so cute?

In 1973 Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, a zoologist, put quantitative measurements on ‘cuteness’. He listed several infantile traits such as small body size, a disproportionately large head, large eyes, playfulness and curiosity. It’s easy to see that a wide eyed panda, rolling around whilst chewing his bamboo shoot with his funny human-like thumb (which is in fact an adapted wrist bone) would fit all of these traits.

These childlike features trigger a nurturing response in people so they respond more positively to animals that look like babies. It’s not restricted to people either, think about all those stories of gorillas adopting kitten and hippos adopting tortoises. Small cute things appear vulnerable and helpless so we want to adopt them. It’s an evolutionary trick, which has been in use for millenia. The recent find of a baby Triceratops skull with an overly large skull shows even ancient species knew the benefits of being a cutie-pie.

Although, I think the biggest reasons we like pandas is just that they are out right funny, with their black eyes they look like they smudged their make up from the night before and haven’t slept in a week, whilst their endangered nature make them the underdog we all love to help out.

With their guaranteed cute appeal it looks like Tian Tian and Yangguang will be welcomed with open arms to Edinburgh Zoo.

Facts about Pandas:

The giant panda is listed as endangered in the World Conservation Union's (IUCN's) Red List of Threatened Animals. It is one of the most critically endangered species in the world. There are about 1,000 left in the wild.

The Wolong Giant Panda Reserve is the world’s largest panda reserve and research institution. It is also the world’s largest breeding base and panda sperm bank.

It's Cheese, Gromit, But Not As We Know It!

As a child asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would ignore the likelihood that my asthma, 5'1 height and lack of army training would probably prevent my dream and reply 'Astronaut'. Well twelve lucky, strong-lunged and tall men got to live out my dream and visit the Moon. Now, over forty years on, the Apollo missions are once again proving their scientific worth and are back in the forefront of scientific minds as new analytical techniques applied to  seismic data taken from the moon during Apollo has discovered the Moon has a liquid core like our Earth. 

In the final Apollo mission (the only geologist astronaut), Harrison Schmitt, collected a pristine and beautiful moon rock sample, Troctolite 7653. Full of milky white and dark green crystals, an analysis of this sample showed evidence of magnetic alignment, and the possibility of a liquid Moon core. It can now be compared with data collected between 1962 and 1977 when the Apollo missions deployed four seismic stations which recorded seismic tremors beneath the Moon's surface.

Dr Schmitt poses with the American flag, with the Earth in the background.

 The new research shows that the core seems to have both a solid and a liquid section, similar to our own Earth, however it also contains a partially melted section which our own planet is missing containing both large lumps of rock as well as magma. Dr Renee Weber (a very accomplished woman in science and the project scientist for the Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project) and her colleagues analyzed this data to find the moon has a core of 330Km diameter, which is still liquid even 4.5 Billion years after the moon formed! She is currently involved in, what is now a very important, proposal to send seismic data instruments back to the Moon. Although, sending modern technology to the Moon surface has no guarantee of producing better results. The rarity of Moonquakes means data is sparse, whilst the cracked and broken surface means signals are masked by noise, hence why computers of the seventies were unable to decode the signals they received then. 

The Moon's layers

 Up until now the topography and mineralogical composition of the moons surface was well understood, but it's interior remained in doubt. If the Moon did indeed form when a Mars sized object impacted the partially molten Early Earth then it stands to reason it would contain various heavy elements and light elements which would separate out into a core, mantle and crust. Weber understands the implications of her discovery. "If we have any hope of determining once and for all how the moon formed then we need to understand it's structure completely." 

It seems Gromit will need to find some more evidence before we all agree with his theory that the Moon is in fact made from cheese.