This link has been circulating around various social networking sites and no one can say for sure what it is. Some have said it’s blood from the meat packing district (this is the least plausible answer in my opinion), others say it’s an algal bloom, and others say it is a sewage treatment pond where some kind of algae or chemicals are being used to clean water. Another theory is that the area is used for salt mining.
My guess is that it is for sewage treatment and some kind of algae/chemical is being used. There seems to be some kind of pipe heading towards the pond in the picture.
There are also several ponds around it, one of which has a bit of red on the edge.
This leads me to believe the area is for sewage treatment.
It’s not the same colour when you zoom out - it just looks normal. At the very least, this indicates that it isn’t always that colour. I think the vivid colour of the detailed image might be partly due to colour-correction that may have been applied in order to get other parts of the image to match more closely with their surrounding tiles. I would guess that in real life, it might be red-brown or coppery in colour.
There are other sections of the same waterway/channel that look more… well… realistic.
Ehrh, I’m not a muslim, but from what I remember hearing when the slaughterhouse in my home town got a halal line, one of the requirements of halal butchering is that all the blood must be drained out and not used. Could any muslim dopers kindly verify or correct this, please?
Imagine for a minute a pool of blood of that size (take a look at the buildings for scale). It would probably look black for all the flies rather than red. And I can’t imagine buildings so close to it if it was something predictable like butchery runoff.
I can’t imagine blood would stay very red very long in those conditions anyway. It could be an industrial spillage of dye or pigment of some kind, I suppose, but other not-quite-so-red features nearby seem to suggest it’s some kind of local mineral in suspension. My money is still on red ochre mud, rendered scarlet by Google’s treatment of the imaging data.
