Posted on 02/12/2015 6:56:12 PM PST by Fred Nerks
They've cracked it - again! A Russian team of ice explorers has broken through to a lake buried beneath nearly 4 kilometres of Antarctic ice. The lake has been isolated from the surface for 15 million years and could hold extreme forms of life never seen before, perhaps even offering clues as to what life on other planets might look like. Lake Vostok is Antarctica's largest subglacial lake. It was reached once before in 2012, when a Russian team finished drilling a hole some 3770 metres down to its surface. They claimed that water samples they obtained from this borehole contained DNA that was unlike known bacteria, suggesting they may have found an unusual native species. But the find is controversial, not least because the samples were contaminated with fluid used to aid drilling. The second attempt reached the lake surface at 5.12 pm on 25 January. The team used the same borehole down to 3400 metres below the surface, after which the holes diverge. This time, the team says they proceeded with extreme caution and are confident that the new samples they retrieved are pristine lake water. Using information on the lake's pressure and depth, collected in 2012, they calculated how slowly they needed to raise the drill to avoid a piston effect, whereby lake water suddenly surges upwards and mixes with drilling fluids, which is what happened last time. The team was led by Vladimir Lipenkov of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute and Nikolay Vasiliev of the National Mineral Resources University, both in St Petersberg.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Just amazing.
Can’t wait to learn what is down there.
yeah..I think 15 million years is a bit rich. There are fossil trees lying around that suggest a much better climate not that long ago.
Probably just mud.
I would love to know what’s down there too, but putting the Russians in charge of making sure its done right is like asking a orangutan to put away your china.
Wouldn’t surprise me what they found down there.
First long-necked dinosaur fossil found in Antarctica
C’mon!!!
I was thinking long neck beers...
fossil trees Antarctic GOOGLE IMAGES
HELLO THERE!
welcome back
Now that's funny right there!
Vostok again
“Wouldn’t surprise me what they found down there.”
Perhaps, an honest Democrat, extinct these millions of years, of course!
C’mon what?, you don’t think they will find mud?
I always find mud at the bottom of lakes, ponds and rivers.
Now what would really be cool is if they found something alive down there bigger than a microbe.
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