Content provided by Andrea Thompson, OurAmazingPlanet
Under the 2-mile-thick layer of ice on a desolate, remote plain in
Antarctica lies a lake that has been buried for millennia. Scientists
with the British Antarctic Survey are currently camped out above that
lake, engaged in an effort, years in the making, to drill down and take
water samples from the lake, to see if it holds any forms of life.
Lake Ellsworth is about 7 miles long, a mile wide and 500 feet deep (11
kilometers by 1.6 kilometers by 152 meters). Because the lake has been
sealed off by a thick blanket of ice for up to 1 million years — before
modern humans evolved — scientists think microbes or other forms of life
in the water could have evolved in interesting ways to deal with an
isolated environment away from sunlight.
The plan to drill into Lake Ellsworth
involves a specially designed hot water drill that would bore through
the ice and down to the fresh lake water, and then send 24 titanium
canisters down through the borehole to take water samples. But the plan
has hit a snag.
A circuit used in the main boiler that supplies hot water to the drill
has burned out twice. The team is awaiting resupply while working to
understand how to prevent the problem from happening again.
"We're experiencing some technical difficulties right now that is
preventing us from continuing, at this moment, exploration of the
subglacial lake that lies 3 kilometers beneath our feet," Martin
Siegert, the lead investigator for the project and a glaciologist at the
University of Bristol, said in a Dec. 17 video update on the project's
blog.
Siegert noted that such difficulties are not unusual when working in Antarctica. "It's a very hostile environment; it's very difficult to do things smoothly," he said.
While the team is waiting for the new part, it's doing plenty of other
science. This week the researchers have been walking a line 1 km to the
northeast and southeast of their camp and taking samples of snow at
regular intervals. The snow will be melted down and sampled to see what
organisms dwell in the snow of the region. (Extreme Antarctica: Amazing Photos of Lake Ellsworth)
"When we get into the lake itself, we want to know that the things that
we find in it have actually come from the lake, and not from either the
drill fluid or the area around the site," explained David Pearce, one
of the team's lead scientists, in a video update from Dec. 18.
Siegert said he hopes the team will be able to resume drilling by the
end of the week and that the good news is that it has plenty of fuel to
continue drilling with.
The harshness of the Antarctic environment
and the complete darkness of winter mean that the team can be at the
site only during the comparatively mild months of austral spring and
summer, from November through January. And once the team breaches the
lake, it will have 24 hours to take samples before the borehole freezes
shut.
Finding microbes in the frigid, dark waters of the lake could help
scientists better understand the origins of life on our own planet and
the potential environments in which it could arise on other planets.
Even if no signs of life are found in the lake, that could inform
science's understanding of the limits by which life is bound.
The team also hopes to take samples of mud from the bottom of the lake,
to better understand the geological history of the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet and Earth's past climate.
A group of Russian scientists is drilling down into the waters of Lake
Vostok, the largest of Antarctica's buried lakes. The team reached the
lake's waters during the last drilling season, on Feb. 5, but the few microbes it found in the retrieved samples were all contaminants from the drilling apparatus.
However, another group of scientists has found a thriving community of microbes in Lake Vida, another buried Antarctic lake that is thought to have been isolated from the rest of the world for about 2,800 years.
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