Lake Vostok

Some weeks ago I read some RSS header stating that Russian scientifics were starting to drill into Lake Vostok. I could not stop to read on, and then I forgot about it until reading this on BBC's Web site today.

This is pretty interesting stuff. I first knew about this lake some years ago when I watched this great documentary, The Lost World of Lake Vostok.
The main ideas portrayed in the documentary and that got stored in my memory were:

• Being an environment isolated from the rest of the planet for many, many, many centuries, and under conditions not present on any other corner of the Earth, forms of life absolutely different (to say the least) could have evolved there. We could have a whole new range of extremophile creatures there.


• Conditions in Lake Vostok could bear huge resemblance to those in Europa, that Jupiter satellite where allegedly a water world could exist under a thick ice layer.


• Drilling into the lake could spoil this whole mysterious world, cause as we've usually done other times when "conquering new lands" we could take with us all sort of microscopic life forms that could put at risk this untouched ecosystem.

Reading the BBC article seems like my memory served me well, and the contamination issue has been the main stopper amid the many other technical difficulties. Russian scientists appear to have come up with some ingenious and well thought work arounds:

They said that instead of drilling into the lake, they would go down until a sensor on the drill detects free water.

Then they would take the drill out without going any further and adjust the pressure so that instead of any liquid in the borehole falling down into the lake, water in the lake would be sucked up.

Then the drill would be taken away and left for quite some time to freeze, creating a plug of frozen ice in the bottom of the hole.

Finally, next season, the team would drill down again to take a sample of that ice and analyse it.

Some scientists are not so certain about this procedure being so completely innocuous, but seem to be the least. Let's hope this time the majority is right.

All this said, seems like we could be at the doorway of some really breakthrough in our understanding of life emergence and evolution, thought there's a really important fact mentioned in the article and of which I was absolutely unaware, in the last years a series of rivers have been found under the Antartic ice. These rivers connect other sub-glacial lakes, and if it were the case that they also had reached Vostok Lake, the idea of a completely independent ecosystem should be discarded.