This is Coronado Feeders, a Texas industrial beef farm in Delhart.
Could anybody enlighten me and tell me wtf is this blood-red lagoon? Is that literally blood and animal residue? Or is it something else that gives that color?
So what causes this blood pool?
This red blood lagoon is actually where manure is stored on the farm. Cows are not killed in bulk on farms but only kept there. This is not a feed lot, or blood-run pool. The squares near the lagoon would most likely be the lots, and the manure would be transported either via pipeline or tanker to the lagoon. But why do we have a blood-red water color?
This is not a true color image, but is color infrared (CIR). CIR imagery takes light wavelengths that aren’t visible to the human eye and recolors them so that the human eye can see them. It colors near infrared (NIR) light as red, red light as green, and green light as blue, and blue light is left out (there isn’t much interesting blue stuff on the Earth’s surface which is why that color is not displayed).
So what we’re looking at is a bunch of NIR light, showing up as bright red in the image. NIR is typically caused by plant life/heavy photosynthesis (plants reflect almost all NIR light). From there, we can tell that there is a LOT of plant life in this lagoon.
These may be purple sulfur bacteria which are capable of photosynthesis, and are often found in hot springs or stagnant water (like this lagoon!).
My best guess is that all of the cow poop caused an algal bloom (or purple bacteria bloom), and what we’re looking at is a bunch of algae or photosynthetical bacteria. This is a grose little pond, but it’s not a festering pool of blood or anything like that.
