Lake Vida to Be Revisited Next Year
17.09.2009 - Water & Oceans, Ice & Snow, Flora & Fauna, Other, Antarctic
Lake Vida is a geologic oddity in Antarctica. A lake with water five to seven times as salty as sea water covered by about 20 metres (60 feet) of ice year-round, was discovered in 2002 to have 2,800 year-old cryobiological microbes that were able to be revived after being thawed out.
Now Peter Doran, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago who made this discovery, plans to return to Lake Vida with his department colleague Fabien Kenig and collaborators from the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute plan to return to Lake Vida late next year to do more exploration of the lake with an NSF grant. The team plans to be the first ever to take a lake sediment core from Lake Vida by drilling through its thick ice cover, through the brine of the lake, and down into the lake's sediment to retrieve about another 3 metres (10 feet) or more of core sample for analysis.
The sediment samples will not only tell a lot about the current ecosystems there today, but they could also reveal information about life in such an extreme environment going back thousands of years. This could help geoscientists get a better idea of the processes that occur as the Earth moves into colder periods, pointing to changes in the lake's ecosystem as it froze.
The main challenge, however, will be to avoid disturbing the fragile environment of the lake or contaminating the samples. A dill as sterile as a surgeon's scalpel will need to be used.
