Researchers Looking for Abundant Microbial Life in Antarctic Subglacial Lakes
24.03.2010 - Water & Oceans, Ice & Snow, Flora & Fauna, Antarctic
As the interior of the Antarctic continent may not be home to the plant and animal life found abundantly on other continents, for a long time it was thought to have little or no life. In reality the opposite is true: Antarctica is home to large numbers of microbes, bacteria and other microscopic organisms, and when the number of indigenous Antarctic species is added together, it likely equals or even exceeds all the living creatures in the freshwater lakes, rivers and streams elsewhere on Earth.
This idea was presented at the Chapman Conference on the Exploration and Study of Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments (SAE) in Baltimore, Maryland, which focused on research into subglacial lakes in Antarctica. The conference, which featured 100 scientists from around the world, was called at a time when three major projects to be conducted over the next five years are expected to shed new light on the hidden worlds of Antarctic subglacial lakes, which are potentially teeming with microbial life.
An American team, a Russian team and a British team are preparing to drill through the kilometres-thick Antarctic Ice Sheet to learn more about the internal workings of the massive ice sheet covering the continent - which contains some 70 % of the planet's fresh water - during a time of climate change. The lakes are also of interest to astrobiologists, who believe that parallel environments containing microbial life may be found elsewhere in the solar system.
The Russian team at Lake Vostok is expected to be the first to penetrate one of these subglacial lakes. Lake Vostok is the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica and the fourth largest lake on the planet in terms of volume. After years of drilling, the team is now within 300 feet of the water, and hopes to reach the lake early next year. There is speculation that the microbes at the bottom of the lake may even be descendants of organisms that lived 25 to 30 million years ago, before Antarctica broke away from other continents and its climate turned cold.
The British program will focus on Lake Ellsworth, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), in an effort to find microbial and other life forms in water that has not seen sunlight for millions of years. Funding for direct exploration of the lake during the 2012-13 season has been approved, during which scientists will use a hot water drill to melt through the overlying ice sheet into the lake water before deploying a probe (to test for life in the lake) and a sediment corer (to recover sediment from the lake-floor).
The US project, called the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project, is located in West Antarctica and will be carried out over six years. WISSARD will focus on life under the glaciers, the movement of these glaciers, subglacial water flows, and any implications there may be for climate change. Through the use of hot water drill technology, the team will eventually make some 15 boreholes while trying to avoid contaminating the pristine Antarctic lakes - one of the toughest challenges and major priorities for the three teams.
