What could possibly go wrong?

Lake Vostok drilling in Antarctic 'running out of time'

But some experts remain concerned that probing the lake's water - thought by some to be isolated from everything else on Earth - could contaminate the pristine ecosystem and cause irreversible damage.

The sub-glacial lake is located underneath the remote Vostok station in Antarctica.

Overlaid by nearly 4km of ice, it has been isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. Some scientists think the ice cap above and at the edges has created a hydrostatic seal with the surface, preventing lake water from escaping or anything else from getting inside.

And if the Russian team gets through to the pristine waters, they hope to encounter life forms that have never been seen.

Vostok is a sub-glacial lake in Antarctica, hidden some 4,000m (13,000ft) beneath the ice sheet.

With the Antarctic summer almost over, temperatures will soon begin to plummet; they can go as low as -80C.

Scientists will leave the remote base on 6 February, when conditions are still mild enough for a plane to land.

The team has been drilling non-stop for weeks.

"It's like working on an alien planet where no one has been before," Valery Lukin, the deputy head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the project, told BBC News.

"We don't know what awaits us down there," he said, adding that personnel at the station have been working shifts, drilling 24 hours a day.

It was at the Vostok station that the coldest temperature ever found on Earth (-89°C) was recorded on 21 July 1983.

Normally, water in such extreme conditions exists only in one state: ice. And when, in the 1970s British scientists in Antarctica received strange radar readings at the site, the presence of a liquid, freshwater lake below the ice did not instantly spring to mind.

After three km and as we near the bottom [of the ice sheet], the ice temperature gets very close to the ice melting point, and all sorts of problems begin”

It was not until 1996 that the discovery was formally acknowledged, after satellites sent in the images outlining the lake's contours.

Space radar revealed that the sub-glacial body of fresh water was one of the largest lakes in the world - and one of some 150 subglacial lakes in Antarctica.

At 10,000 square km and with depths reaching 800m, it is similar to Lake Baikal in Siberia or Lake Ontario in North America.

link

 

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KejPX-qnuzs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Derail: Can't wait for the prequel.

 

Scientists close to entering Vostok, Antarctica’s biggest subglacial lake

After drilling for two decades through more than two miles of antarctic ice, Russian scientists are on the verge of entering a vast, dark lake that hasn’t been touched by light for more than 20 million years.

Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive “de-gassing” of a body of water that has especially high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen.

full article