That’s an image from the “Blood Falls”, a five-story, blood-red waterfall that pours very slowly–the falls are frozen, and so flow slowy–out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. That multi-coloured bump in the lower left is a tent, if that helps you get an idea of scale
The falls were first observed around a hundred years ago, but it was some time after that before the real story of what the falls are, and why, came out.
So what is the real story? Well, let’s just quote from the Atlas Obscura entry on the thing:
Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist in a world with no light or free oxygen and little heat, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color.
There are so many ways that could be the setup for a science fiction horror–and the visuals are already there! You could do the “ancient microbe that died out elsewhere is released from the millions-of-year time capsule with horrible results” story, or the “independent evolution results in dangerous and unique organism” story, or… well, so many stories, as I said.
I’d also be quite happy with it being the Fisher King-like unhealing wound of an Old One remaining from the Mountain of Madness days that has created a pocket of monster blood under the ice too…
Of course none of those horror stories are half as scary as the potential results of what’s being released from the ice at the other end of the world as we melt it off…
