Surreal Footage Shows ‘Blood Rain’ Pouring Over Iran’s Rainbow Island and Mixing With Sea Water

A few years back, NASA’s satellites captured the image of Hormuz Island that sits like a rose-colored teardrop in the teal blue waters of the Arabian Sea. With salt streams flowing through the groves of mangrove forests, Hormuz nestles with a mosaic of colors that come from the melange of minerals it cradles inside its ochre-tinted belly. This belly also hosts a rock where turtles arrive to mate and lay their eggs. About 1.5 miles from this rock, deep inside the heartland of Iran, the virgin “Rainbow Island” is bleeding red. During the spring rain this year, a tour guide named @hormoz_omid filmed footage of mysterious red waters that swept the entire landscape in crimson hues.

The footage captures a small episode of the “Rainbow Island,” nicknamed “Red Beach,” getting bathed in a deluge of rain. Scattered across the beach and its rocky cliffs, tourists appear stunned by the surreal visual of ruddy stretches glistening red with rainwater. The sandy stretch looks like the volcanic cave of a mythical reptile monster who has just gobbled up an entire town of humans. A still shot of this “blood rain” might appear to you like a piece of red velvet cake, but after watching the wild red waters gushing in spiralling trails and cascading down the jagged cliffs, you may not like to see the beach as a mere static cake.

After dribbling and dripping down from the mountainous sculptures, the red waters are spilling on the shoreline stretch, painting the entire coastline like a gigantic landscape on Mars. You may wonder, all these details are nice, but why red? Well, ask science. The answer, rather, is much simpler. It is tucked in the crystal of a notorious chemical compound called “iron oxide.”

As also seen in the image captured by NASA’s Landsat 8, the Rainbow Island is blanketed by vivid red soils chundering from the fuming ashes of surrounding volcanoes and oozing from the sweat of weeping volcanic rocks whose mouths are crammed with deposits of rainbow-colored minerals. Also called “golack,” these iron-rich red soils are used for making everything from lipsticks to spicy sauces people slather on tomashi breads and toasts, according to a 2023 report published in Chemosphere. These metal-containing red soils are the mischievous party causing the Rainbow Island to bleed. 

According to an explanation shared by The Sun, the enrapturing “blood rain” phenomenon unfolds when these red soils get mixed up with ebbing tides or pouring rainwater. Apart from the guide’s Instagram page, the video was circulated across the internet via zillions of posts. On Reddit, for instance, the mesmerizing visual prompted a flurry of fantasy stories among viewers. “Raining blood from a lacerated sky,” exclaimed u/Valten78. u/midnightmare79 said, “Feels like it should be in the film Crimson Peak.” Others likened the blood rain to images like a river of glittering rubies, a heavy metal concert, a sacrificial site of the Blood God. Apparently, it’s not just Bonnie and Taylor Sims who say “I See Red.”

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