(Reuters) - For 15 million years, an icebound lake has remained sealed deep beneath Antarctica's frozen crust, possibly hiding prehistoric or unknown life. Now Russian scientists are on the brink of piercing through to its secrets.
Lake Vostok, about the size of Lake Baikal in Siberia, is the largest, deepest and most isolated of Antarctica's 150 subglacial lakes. It is supersaturated with oxygen, resembling no other known environment on Earth.
.
"There's only a bit left to go," Alexei Turkeyev, chief of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone. His team has drilled for weeks in a race to reach the lake, 3,750 meters (12,000 ft) beneath the polar ice cap, before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.
Scientists suspect the lake's depths will reveal new life forms, show how the planet was before the ice age and how life evolved. It could offer a glimpse at what conditions for life exist in the similar extremes of Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa.
"It's like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don't know what we'll find," said Valery Lukin of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St. Petersburg, which oversees the expedition.
"I feel very excited but once we do it there is no going back," Alexei Ekaikin, a scientist with the expedition said from Vostok Station. "Once you touch it, it will be touched forever."
See the full article here:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/08/us-russia-antarctica-lake-idUSTRE7135MB20110208?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews
No comments:
Post a Comment