Moscow, February 06: Russian scientists are exploring an icebound lake which has been remained sealed deep beneath the frozen Antarctic surface for 15 million years.
“There’s only a bit left to go,” chief of the Russian polar Vostok Station Alexei Turkeyev told Reuters.
His team has drilled 3,750 meters down the Lake Vostok where the coldest temperature ever found on Earth — minus 89.2 Celsius — was recorded.
The largest, deepest and most isolated of Antarctica’s 150 subglacial lakes, Vostok is about the size of Lake Baikal in Siberia and is supersaturated with oxygen, resembling no other known environment on Earth.
“The Russians are leading the way with a torch,” said John Priscu of Montana State University, a chief scientist with the US program to explore another Antarctic lake.
Experts believe the lake is home to prehistoric or unknown life and the Russian should rush the project to finish work before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.
“I think Lake Vostok is an oasis under the ice sheet for life. It would be really wild to thoroughly sample… But until we learn how to get into the system cleanly that’s an issue,” Priscu told Reuters, adding that many creatures might exist beneath the Antarctic around thermal vents in the depths of Lake Vostok.
Scientists think the lake might reveal new life forms and information on how our planet looked like before the ice age and how life evolved on Earth.
“It’s like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don’t know what we’ll find,” said Valery Lukin of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg.
It has been 100 years since Antarctica’s hidden network of subglacial lakes were discovered via satellite imagery in the late 1990s. Now many scientists are eager to find out more about the hidden lakes of the South Pole.
American and British explorers are also trying to get a piece of the buried lakes with exploring some of the last unexplored reaches of the planet.
Head of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosciences Martin Siegert, who is leading a British expedition to a smaller polar lake said, “It’s an extreme environment but it is one that may be habitable. If it is, curiosity drives us to understand what’s in it. How is it living? Is it flourishing?”
The Antarctic ice crust acts like a duvet keeping the Earth’s geothermal heat inside and preventing the lakes from freezing.
Sediment from the lake could also provide scientists with information about how life used to be in tropical prehistoric times, the AARI’s Lukin said.
——–Agencies