Antarctica's Lake Vostok lies below 4 kilometers of ice, is 15 million years old, and may reveal new organisms that survive in total darkness and cold without sustenance from the sun. It also sounds like the perfect place for the base of an evil genius — I'm planning on looking into real estate promptly.
For five years,a joint team of Russian, American and French scientists have sought to core the ice around the lake, which provides a paleo-climatic record of at least 400,000 years, and maybe as much as a million years. Finally, scientists are now thawing ice segments cut from an 11,866-foot ice core drilled back in 1998. Scientists have been worried about contaminating the lake with microbes from the surface world, but they got around that problem by taking the core from 656 feet above the surface of the lake, two miles below the surface of Antarctica. The ice has since been stored at -35 degrees Celsius at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, where I'm applying for a job tomorrow.
"This lake may have been isolated for that long - 15 million years," said Lanoil, the principal investigator of the research project. "After nearly a year of preparation and verifying protocols, we are now ready to process the samples, and will examine the DNA of these microorganisms to understand how they survived in such an extreme environment."
NASA's interested in checking out the ice and the lake to see if they can find microbes that may resemble microbes that survive in similarly harsh environments on other planets, like Europa or Mars. I'm just interested in getting some ice-front space to build my subterranean "nucular" bunker. Because the one I've got now in my parents' basement kinda blows.
Mystery of Antarctica's 15-Million Year-Old Lake (The Daily Galaxy)
Image Credit: Daily Galaxy
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