Russian Antarctica Team Poised to Reach the 14-Million Year Old Waters of Lake Vostok -a Prehistoric Laboratory

A Russian science team is poised to reach the virgin 14 million year old depths of ice-bound Lake Vostok, an unexplored lake in Antarctica. Russian scientists are drilling down to the oxygen-rich lake at the rate of four meters a day, which is buried beneath a sheet of ice almost four kilometers thick, and extract water samples for analysis. If extreme life is found in the lake, this would have implications for the possibilities of life on Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s satellite Enceladus, both of which host a similar environment.

Lake Vostok is approximately 250 kilometers long and up to 50 kilometers wide (around the size of Lake Ontario in North America), and is up to 800 meters deep. It is isolated from all the other 145 or so subglacial lakes in Antarctica. The lake has been sealed off from the rest of the world by the ice sheet for the past 14 million years. Earlier plans to drill into the lake were squashed by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat (ATS) because of concerns the lake might become contaminated. A team of astrobiologists from NASA concluded in 2003 that such an exploration could be dangerous and lead to contamination because the high oxygen and nitrogen content of the lake would cause the water to “fizz up” like a shaken soda can. Now, the ATS has approved the environmental evaluation for the new attempt by scientists from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St. Petersburg.
AARI spokesman Valery Lukin, Director of the Russian Antarctic Expedition (RAE), said they have invented a way of sampling the lake without the risk of contamination. When the drill reaches the lake, the water pressure will “push the working body and drilling fluid upwards in the borehole,” where it will freeze. The researchers will then return during the next Antarctic summer to remove the frozen water for analysis.

Lake Vostok is supersaturated with oxygen, with levels estimated to be around 50 times greater than an average freshwater lake. Lukin said the researchers hope to find live organisms in the lake, particularly in the mineralized water near the bottom. If life does exist there, the organisms would be “extremophiles,” with many adaptations to allow them to survive.
The Russian team are unsure when their drill will break through because the exact depth of the ice/water boundary is not known, but hope they will reach the water later this month and before the current Antarctic summer season ends. Their borehole is currently 3650 meters deep, which is estimated to be approximately 100 meters above the lake surface. The next stages will use a mechanical drill and kerosene freon to get down to 3725 meters, and a new thermal drill head with a clean silicon-oil fluid to drill the rest of the way. The thermal drill head will be fitted with a camera.
"Lake Vostok is an international treasure. We have to convince not just the scientific community but the entire world that we can do this without contaminating the lake," says Karl Erb, director of the NSF Office of Polar Programs.

At the very edge of the Antarctic ice horizon — is a scattering of snow-drifted buildings and radio towers known as Vostok Station--a Russian scientific outpost on the ice above ancient Lake Vostok that researchers have manned almost continuously for 40 years.

Because of the long isolation, it's believed that Lake Vostok could contain new lifeforms, and unique geochemical processes. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleo-climatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for as long as 15 million years.

Russian researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above the ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica. Scientists will use genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living "time capsules" survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun.

A major issue is the reality that it is impossible to penetrate an isolated ecosystem without contaminating it. The "Catch 22" inherent in exploring Lake Vostok is that the very thing that make it potentially unique: because of its millennia of isolation from the rest of the world, it cannot be explored without introduction of microbes from the outer world.