I don’t start threads much, but this bizarre thing has me so intrigued that I feel I must turn the collective minds of the SDMB to figuring out what the heck it is.
Here’s the video. It’s not a great image, but you can still see the thing under the ice pretty clearly. Basically, the person filming was walking on top of a frozen pond. He approaches a large hole in the ice, and in the rather shallow water, observes something moving around. And I have no idea what it is.
It sort of undulates like an octopus breathing and changing color. It doesn’t leave the area it’s in, and I can’t definitively say that it’s something alive. My best guess is that it’s actually just a discoloration of the vegetation at the bottom of the pond, caused by water flowing up from a natural hot spring. That would explain the hole in the ice, which appears melted rather than cut, and also the frog you can see later in the video, which appears pretty comfortable for a frog in winter. The hot spring idea, though, doesn’t really seem to explain how it seems to push itself up above the weeds and then retreats below them. It’s just so weird how this thing moves; it looks like some kind of living carpet. Does anyone have an alternate idea?
Perhaps the temperature of the water is precluding that from occurring. Or perhaps the bubbles are diffused underneath the organic material and the mud and the movement is all that you see from the angle of the video.
I agree with those who think the orange/red is a high iron content slurry, perhaps from rust - and/or some kind of bacteria enhancing the vividness of the pigment. It appears to behave with pattern of a liquid slowly making its way up through, moving aside the muddy silt, occasionally revealing the orange/red slurry.
I have a steep hillside on my property that has a surface runoff fed stream that exudes a similar colored sludge, I suspect high iron content perhaps from natural iron in soil or some metal that is buried in the hillside that is producing enough rust to create that particular orange/red hue - probably also enriched by orange/red strains of bacteria - just like this video seems to be showing.