Antarctic Plumbing?

Ever since my trip to Antarctica last year, I’ve been very interested in anything relating to that continent. While I was there, I was able to watch a video about Lake Vastok that is buried under miles of ice and thought to have been isolated from the rest of the world for hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Here’s some recent news about it:

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Whether or not lakes buried deep under Antarctica's ice are home to unusual microbes or not, has been a controversial point. Russian and French scientists have wanted to drill beneath the frozen wastes – but others have protested, arguing that they may contaminate weird aquatic ecosystems that have been isolated from the atmosphere, the sun - and each other - for 15 million years or more.

Now the picture has been complicated with new evidence that these numerous underground lakes (150 and counting) could be connected by a complex system of underground rivers – some as wide as London's Thames. This means that any purported microbial ecosystems wouldn't be quite as isolated as once thought – but it also means that drilling into any small lake could accidentally seed surface bacteria into the whole system.

The largest and most famous of these lakes is Lake Vostok which is 4,000 metres beneath the ice sheet, covers 14,000 square kilometres and is 800 metres deep in some places. Studying Vostok could give scientists clues about harsh environments on other planets and their moons. But, Antarctic researchers are now going to have to think even harder about the possible consequences, before they decide whether or not to plumb the depths of these unique environments.

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Very fascinating! Drilling down there without contaminating it poses some very difficult technical difficulties. In the video we watched, they were showing some design concepts for a robot that they would place above the ice, seal it off, have it heat up and self-sterilize and then continue drilling down into the lake. That would (theoretically) eliminate the possibility of microbial contamination, but not contamination due to oil and other chemicals.

I don’t doubt they will eventually get some type of probe into the lake. Really makes me wonder what they’ll eventually find down there?