'New frontier' of Antarctic lake exploration: Russian team ground their way through 3.7 km of solid ice
No one had previously penetrated one of the continent's sub-glacial lakes, prompting Valery Lukin from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg to liken his team's achievement to the Moon landings in 1969. Whatever the comparison, it represents a remarkable feat. Over 20 years of stop-start drilling, the Russian team ground their way through 3.7km (2.3mi) of solid ice, working in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth .
The Vostok project is one of several similar ventures being undertaken in the world's last wilderness. In West Antarctica, the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) is hoping to begin its effort to drill into Lake Ellsworth, while the American Wissard project is targeting Lake Whillans. More than 350 sub-glacial lakes - kept in liquid form by pressure from above and the Earth's heat below - have now been identified across Antarctica, and many others may lie undetected. Together, they form a huge and only partially connected network. Some that may have remained completely isolated could host life forms new to science: cold-loving micro-organisms that have been left to their own evolutionary devices for millennia.
"We've got this vast continent, but we've never really sampled the terra firma," said Montana State University's John Priscu, lead investigator on the US project. He said the "new frontier" beneath the ice sheet could hold an entire ecosystem of microbial life. "There's lots of melt under there... I have called it the planet's largest wetland." The projects are of particular fascination to astrobiologists, who study the origins and likely distribution of life across the Universe. Conditions in these Antarctic lakes may not be so different from those in liquid water bodies thought to exist under the surfaces of icy moons in the outer Solar System such as Jupiter's Europa or Saturn's Enceladus.
But just how isolated each lake has been will affect the prospects for finding any novel life. The water within the lake at Vostok is expected to be younger than the lake's age of 14 million years; despite the lake's isolation, water can still get in and out. A process of melting and freezing at its uppermost regions recycles the water every 10,000-15,000 years. But it is about 800m to the bottom of Vostok, and Prof Priscu said the water there is probably stagnant and could be millions of years old. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17015559
The Vostok project is one of several similar ventures being undertaken in the world's last wilderness. In West Antarctica, the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) is hoping to begin its effort to drill into Lake Ellsworth, while the American Wissard project is targeting Lake Whillans. More than 350 sub-glacial lakes - kept in liquid form by pressure from above and the Earth's heat below - have now been identified across Antarctica, and many others may lie undetected. Together, they form a huge and only partially connected network. Some that may have remained completely isolated could host life forms new to science: cold-loving micro-organisms that have been left to their own evolutionary devices for millennia.
"We've got this vast continent, but we've never really sampled the terra firma," said Montana State University's John Priscu, lead investigator on the US project. He said the "new frontier" beneath the ice sheet could hold an entire ecosystem of microbial life. "There's lots of melt under there... I have called it the planet's largest wetland." The projects are of particular fascination to astrobiologists, who study the origins and likely distribution of life across the Universe. Conditions in these Antarctic lakes may not be so different from those in liquid water bodies thought to exist under the surfaces of icy moons in the outer Solar System such as Jupiter's Europa or Saturn's Enceladus.
But just how isolated each lake has been will affect the prospects for finding any novel life. The water within the lake at Vostok is expected to be younger than the lake's age of 14 million years; despite the lake's isolation, water can still get in and out. A process of melting and freezing at its uppermost regions recycles the water every 10,000-15,000 years. But it is about 800m to the bottom of Vostok, and Prof Priscu said the water there is probably stagnant and could be millions of years old. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17015559
