Breakthrough in search for life miles below Antarctic ice

Published on Thursday 9 February 2012 01:25

After more than two decades of drilling in the Antarctic wastes, Russian scientists have reached a huge freshwater lake – hidden under miles of ice for 20 million years – that may hold clues to the first life on Earth.

Lake Vostok is 160 miles long and 30 miles across and lies almost two-and-a-half miles beneath the ice. It is and is the largest in a web of nearly 400 known sub-glacial lakes in the southern continent, kept liquid by the heat of the Earth’s core.

Scientist hope to find evidence of microbial lifeforms that existed before the last Ice Age, which might also help their search for life on the frozen moons of Jupiter and Saturn, or the polar caps of Mars.

Valery Lukin, head of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI), in charge of the mission, said his team reached the lake’s surface on Sunday.

Mr Lukin has previously compared the Lake Vostok effort to the moon race that the Soviet Union lost to the United States.

“There is no other place on Earth that has been in isolation for more than 20 million years,” said Lev Savatyugin, a researcher with AARI. “It’s a meeting with the unknown.”

Mr Savatyugin said scientists hope to find primeval bacteria that could expand human understanding of the origins of life.

“We need to see what we have here before we send missions to ice-crusted moons, such as Jupiter’s Europa,” he said.

The project, however, has drawn strong fears that tons of lubricants and anti-freeze used in drilling could contaminate the pristine lake. But Mr Lukin said about 50 cubic feet of kerosene and freon poured up to the surface from the boreshaft when the drill broke through, proof that the lake water streamed up from below, froze, and blocked the hole.

Scientists will now remove the frozen sample for analysis.

They believe microbial life may exist in the dark depths of the lake despite its high pressure and constant cold – conditions similar to those expected to be found on Mars, Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “In the simplest sense, it can transform the way we think about life,” Nasa’s chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said yesterday.

Some scientists hope studies of Lake Vostok and other sub-glacial lakes will advance knowledge of Earth’s own climate and help predict its changes.

“It is an important milestone and a major achievement for the Russians because they’ve been working on this for years,” Professor Martin Siegert, a leading scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, which is trying to reach the Antarctic sub-glacial Lake Ellsworth.

In the future, Russian researchers plan to explore the lake using an underwater robot equipped with video cameras that would collect water samples and sediments – a project still awaiting the approval of the Antarctic Treaty organisation.

The prospect of lakes hidden under Antarctic ice was first put forward by scientist and anarchist, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin in the 19th century. Russian geographer Andrei Kapitsa pointed at the likely location of the lake and named it Vostok, following Soviet missions in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until 1994 that its existence was proven by Russian and British scientists.