Scientists Race To Breach Anarctica's Lake Vostok

Red Orbit ^ | Saturday, 5 February 2011, 07:48 CST

[pillut48]

Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years.

Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.

With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out on February 6. “It's minus 40 (Celsius/Fahrenheit) outside,” said Turkeyev. “But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon.”

Scientists are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved in the times before the ice age. The lake could also offer scientists a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extremes on Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“It's like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don't know what we'll find,” Valery Lukin of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the expedition, told Reuters.

[DoughtyOne]

Sorry for the delay in response.

Frankly, I’d like to see a system set up where they can cap the hole with some sort of entry that would minimize outside contaminants.

If we find life there, I want to know it was there before we entered. Finding similar life would lead me to think there might be another way in. If we allow free passage, then we can’t be certain of that.

I’m operating under the impression that we’re drilling through water, into a geological separation, and then on into the new uncharted cavern (for lack of a better description).

If we’re drilling straight through earth or snow-pack into it, then it wouldn’t be quite as critical.

My use of the word contaminants is a rather loose use of the term. I would consider anything including outside life to be a contaminant. What if something we let in could wreak havoc with animal, plant, or microscopic life inside the new cavern. I want to avoid that.