Breaching Lake Vostok: Russians Reach Subterranean Antarctic Lake

Exploring Lake Vostok in Antarctica

On February 5, 2012, Russian scientists have drilled through to Lake Vostok, buried under two and a half miles of Antarctic ice. Shoveling snow in your driveway won't seem so bad after you read the article linked below.

After 14 years of gradual drilling, this will be the first time that a water sample will have been taken from Lake Vostok, which has been entombed in ice for roughly 20 million years.

The liquid samples from Lake Vostok won't reach Moscow until May 2013... due to restrictions on liquids aboard flights. The samples must travel by ship, which, when dealing with Antarctica, is far from a simple prospect.

The next step will be sending a robotic submarine into Lake Vostok, which has been a stranger to sunlight for all this time. The act of observing changes that which is observed, and that goes double for Lake Vostok: the Russian team uses freon-kerosene lubricant for its drilling equipment, instead of the more environmentally-friendly hot water.

The argument that a 2 1/2-mile bore hole full of kerosene and freon will somehow not contaminate Lake Vostok has met with a predictably credulous response.

Antarctica is a cold, cold place; and Lake Vostok is in the coldest part:

The water in Lake Vostok, however, is liquid: at a temperature of around -3C, the lake remains in that state due to the pressure of the ice bearing down on it from above.