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Lake Vostok

Now Lake Vida, the Eldritch Ones are biund to be there.

Antarctic lake's clue to alien life
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20501574
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website

Researchers worked under secure, sterile tents on the lake's surface to keep the site and equipment clean

The discovery of microbes thriving in the salty, sub-zero conditions of an Antarctic lake could raise the prospects for life on the Solar System's icy moons.

Researchers found a diverse community of bugs living in the lake's dark environment, at temperatures of -13C.

Furthermore, they say the lake's life forms have been sealed off from the outside world for some 2,800 years.

Details of the work have been outlined in the journal PNAS.

Lake Vida, the largest of several unique lakes found in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, contains no oxygen, is acidic, mostly frozen and possesses the highest nitrous oxide levels of any natural water body on Earth.

A briny liquid that is approximately six times saltier than seawater percolates throughout the icy environment.

Dr Cynan Ellis-Evans, from the British Antarctic Survey (Bas), who was not involved in the recent research, told BBC News: "There are various lakes that are very salty down there... but this is a really freaky one.

"It's almost frozen solid right to the bottom. But you've got this brine 'mush' in the centre. For several years, they've been trying to get into it."

He said the discovery of microbes at such low temperatures was "a very interesting discovery".

During field campaigns in 2005 and 2010, Alison Murray, from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada, and colleagues drilled out cores of ice from the lake, collected samples of the brine from the frozen material, and assessed the water's potential for harbouring life.


The team retrieved cores from the lake during campaigns in 2005 and 2010
To avoid contaminating the isolated ecosystem, they used stringent procedures and specialised equipment, working under secure, sterile tents on the lake's surface.

The abundance of different chemical compounds present in the lake led the researchers to conclude that chemical reactions were taking place between the brine and the underlying iron-rich sediments, producing the nitrous oxide and molecular hydrogen.

The hydrogen, in part, may provide the energy needed to support the brine's diverse microbial life. In addition, the slow rate of metabolism of these microbes prevents the energy reserves from being quickly depleted.

"It's plausible that a life-supporting energy source exists solely from the chemical reaction between anoxic salt water and the rock," said co-author Dr Christian Fritsen, also from the DRI.

If this is indeed the case, said Dr Murray, it provides "an entirely new framework for thinking of how life can be supported in cryo-ecosystems on Earth and in other icy worlds of the Universe".

Jupiter's icy moon Europa represents one such target.

Dr Ellis-Evans commented: "If you go to somewhere like Europa, this sort of finding is really of interest. You can apply this more or less directly.

He pointed to recent evidence that pockets of slushy ice and liquid water might also persist in Europa's ice shell: "That would be just the sort of system we're talking about here, with limited connections to the outside world," he said.

The PNAS report's publication comes as scientists fly out of the UK to join an effort to drill through the 3km of ice covering Lake Ellsworth, which is hidden beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The discovery of any microbial communities here would be significant because the lake water may have been sealed off from the outside world for up to half a million years.

Late last year, a Russian team drilled through to Lake Vostok, an even larger lake covered by some 4km of ice. But preliminary analyses of lake water that froze on to the drill bit showed scant evidence for the presence of living organisms.

[email protected].
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Drilling begins at lake hidden beneath Antarctic
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20682647

Heated well head being lowered in preparation for drilling

A British research team in Antarctica has launched a long-awaited project to hunt for life in a lake hidden beneath the ice-sheet.

A team of 12 scientists and engineers has begun work at remote Lake Ellsworth.

They are using a high-pressure hose and sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through more than two miles of ice.

The aim is to analyse ice waters isolated for up to 500,000 years.

The process of opening a bore-hole is expected to last five days and will be followed by a rapid sampling operation before the ice refreezes.

Lake Ellsworth is one of several hundred lakes known to exist beneath the ice-sheet - its waters kept just above freezing temperature by the warmth of the rocks below.

It is thought that the lake has been cut off from the outside world for long enough to raise the possibility that microbial life has evolved in unique ways.

This will be the first attempt to use highly sterilised equipment to collect samples of water and sediment from a body of water so deep and isolated for so long.

The aim of the project is to investigate the limits of where life is possible so preventing any contamination has been integral to the design of the equipment.

Delicate work
Chief scientist Prof Martin Siegert told the BBC that "everything has to be done in ultra clean conditions."

"We don't want to contaminate this pristine environment - and unless we keep the experiment very clean, we're likely just to measure the things that we bring down us with, which would be pointless."

The engineer in charge of the hot water drilling, Andy Tait, described the operation as "huge but delicate".

"Although hot-water drilling technology has been used extensively by scientists in the past, this is the first time we've ever attempted to go through 3km of solid ice - this will be the deepest borehole ever made this way.

"We've fired up the boilers to heat the water to 90°C. The water pressure coming out of the hose will be around 2,000 PSI - 15 to 20 times more powerful than the kind you wash your car with.


The site is extremely remote
"It is the most effective way to obtain rapid, clean access to Lake Ellsworth."

The next two days will be spent drilling out a 'chamber' the size of a caravan below the surface of the ice-sheet so that a reservoir of sterilised water is ready to prevent any lake water rising up into the borehole.

Prof Siegert said that exploring for life in such an extreme environment - in pitch-black conditions under high pressure beneath the ice-sheet - could open up possibilities for life on other worlds such as Jupiter's moon Europa.

"The experiment we're doing is very similar to an experiment one might do to see whether there is life on Europa.

"We know Europa has an icy crust and an ocean beneath it.

"If there's life on Europa it'll be living in a very similar way to life in Lake Ellsworth with total darkness, lots of pressure and using chemical processes rather than sunlight to power biological processes."

If all goes according to plan in Antarctica, the first results should be announced next week - potentially a landmark moment in polar science.
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Perhaps this thread should be renamed, as it's no longer just about Lake Vostock. ("Exploring Antarctic lakes under the ice", perhaps.)

Just to confuse things further, the first reference to the British expedition to Lake Ellsworth was made by me, in Environmental Issues:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 40#1146940 8)
 
rynner2 said:
Perhaps this thread should be renamed, as it's no longer just about Lake Vostock. ("Exploring Antarctic lakes under the ice", perhaps.)

Just to confuse things further, the first reference to the British expedition to Lake Ellsworth was made by me, in Environmental Issues:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 40#1146940 8)
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1. Good idea re name change.

2. Move your Ellsworth post into the this thread.
 
ramonmercado said:
rynner2 said:
Perhaps this thread should be renamed, as it's no longer just about Lake Vostock. ("Exploring Antarctic lakes under the ice", perhaps.)
Just to confuse things further, the first reference to the British expedition to Lake Ellsworth was made by me, in Environmental Issues:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 40#1146940 8)
Click to expand...
1. Good idea re name change.

2. Move your Ellsworth post into the this thread.
Click to expand...
I'd better let a Mod handle that, otherwise the posts would probably end up out of order, just adding to the confusion!

(You can never find a mod when you want one, then three will come along all at once! :D )
 
Sabotaged by Cthulhu.

Lake Ellsworth Antarctic drilling project called off
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20850360

The team burned much of its fuel in a bid to connect the under-ice boreholes

An ambitious mission to drill through 3km (1.8 miles) of Antarctic ice to a lake that has been sealed off for thousands of years has been cut short.

The team at Lake Ellsworth decided to call off the mission in the early hours of Christmas Day UK time.

They were unable to join the main borehole with a parallel hole that was to be used to recover drilling water.

The team is now "weatherising" the equipment and it is unclear when they will be able to resume the project.

The £8m ($13m) project, headed by the British Antarctic Survey (Bas), aimed to drill carefully down using near-boiling water to pierce the lake, which has been untouched for as much as half a million years.

The hope had been to find hints of simple life forms existing in the extreme conditions of pressure and temperature, and to find a record of climate in the lake's sediments.

Continue reading the main story

Analysis
David Shukman
Science editor, BBC News
Searching for life in the hidden waters of Lake Ellsworth was one of the most ambitious British science projects of recent years, so this failure in the drilling programme will come as a huge blow.

The team knew that the risks were high, but the idea of exploring an ancient and mysterious body of water isolated for hundreds of thousands of years had inspired passion and determination.

The challenge of designing and engineering equipment that could remain sterilised on the long journey to Antarctica, and then down through the 3km of ice-sheet, was immense and involved hundreds of people.

So the disappointment will be felt far beyond the 12 men at their remote camp on the ice. Engineers, technicians, support staff - and researchers eager for the results - will feel heavy disappointment. They may try again next year. But this was frontier science, a gamble, and it did not pay off.

Read more from David
The programme ran into trouble last week as the main boiler used to heat drilling water broke down, with a replacement part being flown from the UK reaching the remote site last Friday.

With the boiler working, the team aimed to make two parallel boreholes, intended to join 300m below the surface.

A first borehole was drilled and left for 12 hours to create a hot-water cavity. This was to be used to re-circulate drilling water and to balance pressures when the sequestered lake was finally breached.

However, the team were unable to reach the cavity during the course of drilling the second, main borehole.

"We kept trying for over 24 hours to reach that connection but we couldn't do it," said principal investigator of the project Martin Siegert, from the University of Bristol.

"All that time we were losing fuel and water from the ice sheet surface and we got to a critical condition where our calculations showed us we simply didn't have enough fuel to continue any further down into the ice sheet to hit the top of the lake," he told BBC News.

The team is now starting the long process of gathering up its equipment for eventual return to the UK, where it will be serviced.

Once back on UK soil, the team will have to develop a report on what went wrong, and only then can the thought of a return trip be considered.

"It will take a season or two to get all of our equipment out of Antarctica and back to the UK, so at a minimum we're looking at three to four, maybe five years I would have thought," Prof Siegert said.

But he remained hopeful about the future, and said that this year's mission was far from a complete loss.

"We still want to do that testing, they were compelling scientific drivers a few years ago and they remain so. It's very important that we take stock of what we achieved here," he said.

Given the long time that it may take to fund and mount another mission to Ellsworth, it may be that other nations aim for other sealed-off Antarctic lakes in the nearer term.

"We have never depicted it as a race, but it may well happen that others get there first," Audrey Stevens, Bas spokesperson, told BBC News.
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Russkies do deal with Cthuhlu.

Cool Find: Russian team takes ice from biggest Antarctic sub-glacial lake, searching for life
http://rt.com/news/lake-vostok-ice-life-743/

A man stands near drilling apparatus at the Vostok (Lake) research camp in Antarctica (Reuters / Handout)

Nearly a year after Russian researchers reached the unique sub-glacial Lake Vostok, the first sample of transparent ice from its water has been taken. The finding is of great value as it could reveal if the lake harbors life.

The Lake Vostok, isolated by 4-kilometer layer of ice for around the past 20 million years, has been of great interest to scientists since it was first discovered in the 1990s. Locating it became one of the major finds in modern geography.

If it turns out that some primitive bacteria or even more complex life-forms survived in the lake’s waters it could offer an earth-shattering insight into our planet’s past.

Scientists managed to reach the fresh ice only on the depth of 3383 meters and took samples at 3,406 meters.

“The first core of transparent lake ice, 2 meters long, was obtained on January 10 at a depth of 3,406 meters. Inside it was a vertical channel filled with white bubble-rich ice,” the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute said in its statement.

The ice formed as the water from the lake rose up into the whole due to under-pressure in the crack researchers drilled in last February.
“Initially, we saw completely unknown to us ice – an opaque, porous, bright white,” explained Vyacheslav Martianov, the deputy head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition. “But 20 meters after that we saw transparent ice, with the white ice frozen inside of it.”

This ice may have very specific physical properties that are different from ordinary ice and anything ever known before, Martianov said.

Russian researchers posing for a picture after reaching the subglacial lake Vostok. The scientists hold the sign reading: "05.02.12, Vostok station, boreshaft 5gr, lake at depth 3769.3 metres." (AFP Photo / Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute Press Service)

No one could predict what scientists would find in the ice hole.

All samples will be brought to Saint-Petersburg in May on board the research ship Academic Fyodorov, which is currently working in the Antarctic.

Now researchers plan to continue drilling to the depth of 3430 meters.
Last year Russian scientists managed to drill through 3700 meters of ice, reach the surface of the lake and take 40 liters of prehistoric water.

However, those samples, as scientists said later, were not clean enough to prove the existences of any kind of life – the water contained some substances from the outside.

The following day, drilling liquid was found– some 1,500 liters of kerosene and Freon poured into special containers.

That’s why rival Western expeditions also racing to probe the depths of the sub-glacial lake have been using the hot-water drilling method – boiling the ice – which is slower but cleaner.

Russian scientists hope to use this find to answer whether or not traces of life can be found in the lake.

Vostok is just one of hundreds of subglacial lakes in the Antarctic. There are plans to drill into two others, Lake Ellsworth and Lake Whillans.

Handout of drilling milestones reached and marked on the wall at the Vostok camp in Antarctica (Reuters / Alexey Ekaikin / Handout)

A British team attempted to drill into Ellsworth and collect samples of sediment from the bottom. However, British scientists failed and later halted the mission.

The British scientists abandoned the mission for at least three years, after trying for 20 hours to connect two holes in the ice that were needed for the hot-water drill to work.

The US team plans to start drilling in Lake Whillans in the beginning of 2013.

Lake Vostok was discovered by Russian specialists, supported by their British counterparts, back in 1996. Sonar and satellite images later proved the lake to be one of the world’s largest freshwater reservoirs. With its area reaching 15,000 square kilometers and a depth exceeding 1,200 meters, Lake Vostok is one of the biggest among 370 subglacial lakes in Antarctica.
However in 1998, drilling was halted just 130 meters from the lake’s surface after alarming concerns the ancient and unblemished waters risked being polluted if special precautions were not taken.

The relevant technology was developed only in 2003 in St. Petersburg. Work resumed in 2005 after further tests.

Drilling in the lake is far from an easy task, with average temperatures near the Vostok Station in the Antarctic reaching around –66 degrees Centigrade. This is close to the record breaking freeze recorded in 1983 when Earths lowest ever temperature was recorded at –89.2 C.
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Why we called off hunt for ancient Antarctic life
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... -life.html

14 January 2013 by Jon White
Magazine issue 2899.

Geoscientist Martin Siegert says that drilling through 3 kilometres of ice to reveal the secrets of an entombed lake was never going to be easy

Why do you want to drill through 3 kilometres of ice to tap Lake Ellsworth, which has been undisturbed for half a million years?
We are trying to test two hypotheses: that life exists in ancient deepwater subglacial lakes, and that sediments on these lake floors contain important climate records, potentially revealing the history of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Why did you have to stop the pioneering hot-water drilling on Christmas Day?
Our procedure was to drill down 300 metres with a short hose, and pause it there to create a cavity of water, which would then be pumped to the ice surface and used to supply water to the main hose, 3400 metres in length. Once the cavity was established, the main hose was drilled to 300 metres and should have connected to the cavity. This is necessary as the pump in the short hose could then be used to regulate the pressure in the main borehole - vital prior to lake entry. The problem was that the main hose did not connect to the cavity. Our attempts to do this reduced our fuel supply to the point where we could no longer reach the lake even if we did connect to the cavity.

How did it feel to make that decision, after many years of preparation?
It was a really sad moment, but the information we had was easy enough to interpret and the call to stop was unavoidable. The annoying thing is that despite our difficulties, we were very close to being successful. If we had linked the cavity, the drill to 3000 metres was not a technical challenge.

What happens next?
We are determined to learn from our experience, and to put the lessons learned to good use in a revised plan. Realistically, this is likely to take three to five years, as equipment needs to come back to the UK, be serviced and modified, and then installed back in Antarctica. We really do wish to see it through to completion. Science is often characterised by setbacks. Our challenge is to deal with these professionally and to make sure that when we try again we are successful.

What positives do you take home with you?
We've learned a great deal. No one has drilled this far before using the technique. We have trialled the whole system in Antarctica and it works well. Our field site and its logistics are well suited to the experiment. Our probe deployment system was field-trialled. Our sterility protocols work well. In fact, bar the issue with the cavity, the actual running of the experiment worked very well. We have much to be positive about, although of course we are hugely disappointed that we didn't do what we wished to this time.

Might your efforts inform plans to check the frozen oceans of icy moons in the solar system for signs of life?
Our need for cleanliness is certainly similar to that used in space science, and the experiment itself is comparable; using a remote device to measure and sample an extreme environment. I think there is a lot that future space missions might learn from our work, which is one of the reasons for us to be so open about things, both good and bad!

Profile
Martin Siegert is a professor of geoscience at the University of Bristol, UK. He discovered Lake Ellsworth in 1996 and is principal investigator in a collaborative British effort to explore it
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Another expedition tempts the patience of Cthuhlu.

Antarctic team reaches Lake Whillans
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/01/an ... llans.html

14 Jan 2013 | 11:58 GMT | Posted by Quirin Schiermeier | Category: Earth, environment & ecology

A team of Antarctic explorers has successfully completed their adventurous 1,000-kilometre traverse from the United States’ McMurdo Station to subglacial Lake Whillans at the margin of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Efforts to drill into the pristine lake buried beneath some 800 metres of ice are to commence this week.

The team hopes to access the shallow water body using an environmentally clean hot-water drill prepared and extensively tested in the last few weeks at the McMurdo station. Once they have reached the lake, they will deploy various sampling instruments through the narrow borehole to probe the water and sediment, which they think might host ancient microbial life.


Traverse to Lake Whillans
WISSARD
“We are all very excited here and trying to get our first flights in,” says John Priscu, lead investigator of the US-led Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project.

Researchers have over the past couple of decades discovered and mapped more than 300 lakes, large and small, beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet. WISSARD is one of three drilling projects being conducted this Antarctic summer, aimed at exploring these dark environments, one of the final frontiers on Earth.

Besides searching for organic life, Priscu and his team will collect data that may shed light on the role of subglacial lakes and rivers in stabilizing or destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

But drilling operations in the cold and remote Antarctic desert are risky. In late December, a British Antarctic Survey team had to abandon plans to reach Lake Ellsworth following technical problems with the hot-water drill.

Meanwhile, Russian scientists who last February first accessed Lake Vostok — by far the largest of Antarctica’s subglacial lakes — announced last week that they have recovered more samples from lake water that has moved up the borehole and refrozen on the drill bit. No native microbes had turned up in a preliminary analysis of the samples taken in February.
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Drill reaches Antarctica's under-ice Lake Whillans
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21231380
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent

An American attempt to bore down into Lake Whillans, a body of water buried almost 1km under the Antarctic ice, has achieved its aim.

Scientists reported on Sunday that sensors on their drill system had noted a change in pressure, indicating contact had been made with the lake.

A camera was then sent down to verify the breakthrough.

The Whillans project is one of a number of such ventures trying to investigate Antarctica's buried lakes.

In December, a British team abandoned its efforts to get into Lake Ellsworth after encountering technical difficulties.

The Russians have taken samples from Lake Vostok, although they have yet to report their findings.

Lake Whillans is sited in the west of Antarctica, on the southeastern edge of the Ross Sea.

The Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (Wissard) team has been using a hot-water drill to melt a 30cm-diameter hole through the overlying ice.

Breakthrough to the lake surface was reported on the project's website.

The intention, now that the hole is secure, is to lower various sampling tools and sensors into the lake to study its properties and environment.

Some of the samples will be assessed onsite at the ice surface in temporary labs, and others will be returned to partner universities for more extensive analysis.

The Wissard blog said the thickness of the overlying ice was measured to be 801m, which agreed well with the estimates from seismic imaging.

More than 300 large bodies of water have now been identified under the White Continent.

They are kept liquid by geothermal heat and pressure, and are part of a vast and dynamic hydrological network at play under the ice sheet.

Some of the lakes are connected, and will exchange water. But some may be completely cut off, in which case their water could have been resident in one place for thousands of years, and that means they probably play host to microorganisms unknown to modern science.

Whillans is not as deep as either Vostok (4km) or Ellsworth (3km), and its water is exchanged much more frequently by the under-ice streams.

Indeed, satellite measurements have revealed the 60-sq-km lake rapidly filling and draining. This was evident from measurements of the height of the overlying ice surface, which raised itself in response to the increased volume, and then slumped down as the water spread to a new location.


Scientists are keen to study Antarctica's subglacial hydrological systems because liquid water beneath the ice sheet will influence its movement (the ice above Lake Whillans is moving at about 300m per year). Modelling the sheet's long-term stability in a warming world has to take this into account.

These under-ice environments may also provide insight into the habitability of some moons in the Solar System.

Europa, a satellite of Jupiter, and Enceladus, which orbits Saturn, both have large volumes of liquid water buried beneath their icy crusts.

Astrobiologists think such moons are promising places to go look for extra-terrestrial microorganisms.

[email protected]. and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
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ramonmercado said:
Thats funny, all contact with the expedition has been lost...
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They announced the result via a strange gurgling sound. Half the reporters present for the announcement are now confined to an asylum. Of the other half, 3 have drown themselves, 6 can't be found, and 4 are on the run from police for mass murder. :lol:
 
Antarctic Lake Vostok buried under two miles of ice found to teem with life
A giant lake buried more than two miles beneath the Antarctic ice has been found to contain a "surprising" variety of life.
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
3:23PM BST 06 Jul 2013

Analysis of ice cores obtained from the basin of Lake Vostok, the subglacial lake that Russian scientists drilled down to in 2012, have revealed DNA from an estimated 3,507 organisms.
While the majority were found to be bacteria, many of which were new to science, there were also other single celled organisms and multicellular organisms found, including from fungi.
The diversity of life from the lake has surprised scientists as many had thought the lake would be sterile due to the extreme conditions.

Lake Vostok was first covered by ice more than 15 million years ago and is now buried 12,000 feet beneath the surface, creating huge pressures. Few nutrients were expected to be found.
However, samples of ice that had formed as water from the lake froze onto the bottom of the glacial ice sheet above have revealed it is teeming with life.
This will raise hopes that life may be found in other extreme environments on other planets. One of Jupiter's moons, Europa, for example, is covered with an icy shell that may hide a liqud ocean below where life could exist.

Dr Scott Rogers, a biologist at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio, and led the DNA analysis of biological material found in the ice cores, said: "We found much more complexity than anyone thought.
"It really shows the tenacity of life, and how organisms can survive in places where a couple dozen years ago we thought nothing could survive.
"The bounds on what is habitable and what is not are changing."

Lake Vostok is around 160 miles long and 30 miles wide, covering an area of more than 6,000 square miles beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

Among the bacteria found in the samples brought to the surface were those commonly found in the digestive systems of fish, crustaceans and annelid worms, raising the prospect there could be more complex life still living in the lake.

Isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years, some of the DNA sequences were found to be unique to science and may belong to new species that have evolved in the depths.

Writing in the journal PLOS One, Dr Rogers and his colleagues said: "The sequences suggest that a complex environment might exist in Lake Vostok.
"Sequences indicating organisms from aquatic, marine, sediment and icy environments were present in the accretion ice.
"In addition, another major proportion of the sequences were from organisms that are symbionts of animals and/or plants.
"Over 35 million years ago, Lake Vostok was open to the atmosphere and was surrounded by a forested ecosystem. At that time, the lake, which might have been a marine bay, probably contained a complex network of organisms.

"As recently as 15 million years ago, portions of the lake were ice free at least part of the time. During these times, organisms were likely being deposited in the lake.
"While the current conditions are different than earlier in its history, the lake seems to have maintained a surprisingly diverse community of organisms.
"These organisms may have slowly adapted to the changing conditions in Lake Vostok during the past 15–35 million years as the lake converted from a terrestrial system to a subglacial system."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... ement=mid1
 
Ok, not Lake Vostok but they just might awaken a sleeping giant as discussed on this thread.

Data to expose 'sleeping ice giant'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25173121
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco

The Recovery Catchment is a large section of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

Scientists have finally begun mapping one of the least explored regions of Antarctica - the Recovery Catchment.

The new survey data should reveal how this vast tract of ice in the east of the continent is likely to respond to a warming world.

Recovery is currently perfectly stable, but any change could have significant global impact because it contains the equivalent of 2.5-3m of sea-level rise.

The ICEGRAV project is trying to determine its vulnerabilities.

"In some senses, this huge Antarctic feature is a sleeping giant," said Dr Fausto Ferraccioli from the British Antarctic Survey.


"We want to understand the circumstances that might disturb it," he told BBC News.

Dr Ferraccioli was speaking here in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting together with Prof Rene Forsberg, of the Danish National Space Institute, and Dr Kenichi Matsuoka, of Norwegian Polar Institute.

They were using the event to give a progress report on ICEGRAV, an international collaboration that also includes Argentina, and has partial economic support from the US.

The project has flown a plane packed with instruments over a large section of the Recovery Catchment, which extends from a point known as Dome A, deep in the ice sheet's interior, all the way to the coast, where glaciers feed the Filchner and Ronne ice shelves in the Weddell Sea.

Twin Otter
The Recovery Catchment would have significant global impact if it were to melt
The aerogeophysical campaign's first data products, presented to AGU, are maps showing variations in gravity, magnetism and ice thickness across the region. The data provides details not possible to observe from satellites. The European Space Agency's Goce mission, falling from the skies only a few weeks ago, has left a big gap in Antarctica, only possible to observe from aircraft.

Taken all together, this data will provide a profile of Recovery from the top of the ice right down to the crust. Like a doctor using a sophisticated medical scanner, the ICEGRAV scientists will then attempt to diagnose the future health prospects for the catchment.

A key quest is to describe the shape of the underlying rock bed, as this will influence how Recovery responds to any melting at the coast.

Under some global warming scenarios for the end of the century, warm water from the Southern Ocean is expected to penetrate deep into the Weddell Sea, eroding the base of its ice shelves.

This could accelerate ice discharge from the Recovery catchment and potentially affect the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

"If we then find the rock bed dips away from the grounding line at the coast towards the interior, we could get something called marine ice-sheet instability," explained Dr Ferraccioli.

"What this means is that once you have warm water getting into the system, there is little to stop further retreat of the ice sheet.

"This is one of the most critical questions we have about Recovery: what is the shape of the bed near the ice sheet's grounding line?"

Warm model
Modelling suggests warm water could push deep into the Weddell Sea
The ICEGRAV Twin Otter aircraft that mapped part of the region during the last Antarctic summer season flew a total of 30,000km from an inland camp supported by the Norwegian Polar Institute.

"Satellite techniques found many subglacial lakes in this region and the new ICEGRAV dataset is crucial to reveal their characteristics and impact on ice flow," said Dr Matsuoka.

Camp
The survey work required a field camp be established deep in the ice sheet’s interior
The Germans are extending the coverage this season with a Baseler plane operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute. And the Americans will complete the work using their instrumented LC130 Hercules, flying a two-season campaign, starting perhaps the season after next.

Prof Robin Bell, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, at Columbia University, New York, will lead the US effort.

"On our existing bed maps, [Recovery Catchment] looks - as I like to say - like 'pancake land' because we don't know much about it. But it's one of those places where warm water could reach fairly far into the ice sheet. Some of the other pancake lands we haven't mapped on the continent appear to be pretty high, so they're not so much of a concern.

"I've always thought this area is an Achilles heel for East Antarctica, but until we have the data we won't know that for sure," she told BBC News.

More knowledge than just the potential ice dynamics of Recovery will come out of the survey.

It will also help scientists interpret geology near the coast that is thought to be a record of the ancient supercontinents.

Just to the north of Recovery Glacier is the Shackleton mountain range, which contains scraps of ocean floor that have been lifted and exposed. These rocks represent a major suture - an imprint of when the land masses came together to form the giant continent Gondwana about 500 million years ago.

And further north still, in so-called Coats Land, there are rocks that probably pinned together East Antarctica and North America when they were joined in the supercontinent Rodina some one billion years in the past.
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Russian scientists have made a new borehole into Lake Vostok, the prehistoric Antarctic water mass, which has been sealed for millions of years – three years after a previous mission was prematurely ended by an accident resulting in sample contamination.

“This is an event of worldwide significance, which has huge scientific value,” said Russia’s environment and mineral resources minister Sergey Donskoy, as the expedition hit the water surface at the depth of 3,769 meters and 15 cm.

The surface of the lake – now listed as the sixth biggest in the world and biggest in Antarctica – had been undisturbed by sunlight for over 15 million years, before it was reached by a Russian drilling team during the Antarctic summer three years ago. ...

http://rt.com/news/226127-lake-vostok-russia-water/
 
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