Lake Vostok

Lake Vostok, largest lake in Antarctica. Located approximately 2.5 miles (4 km) beneath Russia’s Vostok Station on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), the water body is also the largest subglacial lake known. Running more than 150 miles (about 240 km) long with a maximum width of about 31 miles (50 km), the lake is roughly elliptical in shape, and it holds nearly 1,300 cubic miles (5,400 cubic km) of water. After decades of speculation and data gathering, the existence of the lake was confirmed in the mid-1990s by a combination of seismic and ice-penetrating radar surveys.

Most scientists believe that the lake is the product of volcanic activity that melted a portion of the ice overhead. Some scientists maintain that the lake was isolated from Earth’s atmosphere after the EAIS formed more than 30 million years ago. Other scientists argue that the water making up the lake may be much younger, perhaps only about 400,000 years old. Most scientists, however, agree that Lake Vostok might harbor a unique freshwater ecosystem made up of organisms that evolved independently from other forms of life on Earth. The base of the lake’s food chain would need to derive its energy from chemical sources rather than from photosynthesis, and each organism in this environment would need to endure the pressure of 350 atmospheres (about 5,150 pounds per square inch) brought on by the weight of ice sheet above.

A Russian drilling project designed to retrieve ice cores below Vostok Station was initiated in 1990; the station was later found to sit directly above the lake. After the lake’s existence was revealed, the scientists continued to drill, ultimately penetrating some 12,366 feet (3,769 meters) of ice in February 2012 to reach liquid water. Worries over possible contamination of the lake from the drill—as well as the freeze-resistant fluids, such as Freon and kerosene, used in the drilling process—were dispelled when the drill tip punched through the final layers of ice. Pressurized water from the lake rushed up the hole, which forced the drilling fluids upward and away from the lake, before freezing into a 100–130-foot- (30–40-meter-) long ice plug. Shortly after the drill reached the plug, however, the scientists left the station to escape the onset of the coldest part of the Antarctic winter. An ice core was removed from the plug in January 2013 and studied by a Russian team of scientists. In March of that year, after preliminary analyses of the samples taken from the ice core had been completed, Russian state media announced that evidence of bacterial DNA had been found, including at least one type that did not correspond to bacteria known to science. This discovery, however, was later called into question because of possible sample contamination.

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Water and its Varying Forms

Several scientists have remarked that the effort to reach Lake Vostok could be a valuable planning and implementation tool for future space missions designed to search for life on worlds containing ice-covered oceans, such as those that occur on Jupiter’s moon Europa.