Antarctica’s Lake Vostok on Cusp of Revealing Its Secrets
11.01.2011 - Water & Oceans, Ice & Snow, Flora & Fauna, Antarctic
For the last 14 million years, Lake Vostok, which lies beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, has been shielded from the changes occurring elsewhere in Antarctica and on Earth by a four-kilometre thick layer of ice. This unique environment has sparked biologists’ and other scientists’ curiosity, as any life form found there would be either very old, or previously unknown.
A Russian team working at Vostok research station located on the ice sheet above the lake had been waiting to drill through the ice into the lake since 1998, until the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat – the body set up to preserve the continent – approved the comprehensive environmental evaluation carried out to ensure the lake would not be contaminated during the drilling process. With the Secretariat having now given its green light, the researchers from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg say they expect to reach the water in the subglacial lake in late January.
To prevent any possible contamination of the pool, the team came up with a special method for sampling the lake. As they near the bottom of the new borehole, the team will change from a mechanical drill to a newly designed thermal drill head, which is equipped with a camera. When the head finally reaches the water, its pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, before it freezes over again. The following season, the team will go back to retrieve this frozen subglacial lake water and analyze its contents.
