Slashdot Mirror
Antarctic Lake Actually Two in One
Scoria writes "USA Today reports: Scientists have discovered that Lake Vostok, a liquid freshwater lake which has been isolated from the world beneath 4 km of ice for approximately 500,000 years, contains two separate basins. They believe that the basins, which are divided by a ridge that limits water exchange, may host individual ecosystems that are home to ancient microbes."
It's really one giant organism in the process of dividing....
wbs.
Huh?
Nah ... they already covered that one in an episode of X-Files.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Just becaus something is a microbe doesn't make it harmful to humans. How exactly would they have evolved to spread by or do damage to humans if they've been separated from us for that long?
ResidntGeek
We humans aren't going to have any immunity to these microbes that have been isolated for 500000 years.
1 - What tells you these microbes are necessarily harmful to humans? lack of contact with them for half a million years suggests humans may not be their carrier hosts of choice actually.
2 - There are already thousands of deadly yet-unknown diseases lurking right here on the surface, in remote rainforests, waiting to be released by idiotic poacher. One or two more from the bottom of an underice lake won't make much difference.
3 - So what? humanity will either evolve natural defenses, or science will help the natural process, and there are way too many humans on this planet already. I can't remember who said that Gaia (the planet Earth considered a complex living entity) has a form of AIDS disease that's running amok and depleting its resources from within, and it's called Humanity.
Is that in human terms (thousands of years) or microbe terms (billions of years)?
All I got reading the article was that the fresh water has been isolated for 500,000 years and the ridge that separates them limits water exchange, resulting in isolated environments in which two different biomes may have formed.
Isn't the wording of the post a bit along the lines of NASA polit-speak? Unique environments, geothermal heating -- voila NEW LIFE FORMS! Let's submit a budget request for a probe to an ice world to look for life!
And those isolated microbes have been isolated from contact with us as well, so they wouldn't know what to do with us. Organisms and their parasites & diseases co-evolve.
And terrorists? Come on! What terrorist would go out to freakin' Antarctica, drill a couple of kilometers down, just to get what basically amounts to mineral water someone left in a fridge for 500000 years? If you're actually scared of that, you should probably live in fear of terrorists raiding your fridge.
Jeez, some people will see a terrorist connection in everything... no wonder laws like the PATRIOT act can be passed without public uproar.
The conditions in a near-freezing lake at high pressure are very different to those in the human body. So, although it's possible that such microbes would thrive in the human body AND cause lethal illness, it is very unlikely. Then again, there's Murphy's Law (anything that can happen, will)...
I hope whoever's studying these lakes takes appropriate precautions against both accidental release and theft by terrorist organizations.
That's rather alarmist, don't you think?
The odds that a microbe that spent the last few eons living in an arctic lake beneath several kilometers of ice would thrive and wreck havoc in a 37C human body strike me as infintesimly small. Further to that, the chances that Al Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, or Cobra itself are going to infiltrate the artic and spirit away with these microbes are too ridiculous to entertain.
That a liquid freshwater lake can survive that far underneath Antarctica? I would've imagined it to have either frozen, or at least be saltwater, which would enable it to stay liquid in low temperatures. If geothermal heat is responsible, then why isn't the ice around it melting, or is it just one of those finely balanced peculiarities of nature?
drive 100 miles toward the center of whatever continent you live on and you'll find that the earth is no where near over-populated.
Over-population isn't defined by the lack of personal space between two human beings, it's defined by the sustainability of their exploitation of the planet.
As of today, there are 6+ bn people on Earth, about a third of which (the rich ones) already manage to over-exploit most of the planet's resources and destroy parts of it. I let you imagine what it would be if all 6 bn would start consuming even a third of what an average westerner consumes.
This planet should host about 1 to 1.5 bn people comfortably and sustainably. Any more than that is too much.
... Vostok bottled water, a pleasant alternative to Evian. ;-)
Do you like German cars?
They should use this lake to test ideas for drilling into the ice of Europa.
>>Further to that, the chances that Al Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, or Cobra itself are going to infiltrate the artic and spirit away with these microbes are too ridiculous to entertain.
I can see the reflection of the snow in old chrome-dome's facemask now as he flys around Antartica barking out orders....
"GET ME THOSE MICROBES!!"
And only the Joe-Team can stop him. GO JOE!
wbs.
Huh?
Oblig. Reply: "But I'm Mr. Freeze you insensitive clod!"
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Actually the water isn't half a million years old... it's much older than that. By a few billion years at least.
It's only been in the fridge for half a million years.
wbs.
Huh?
Lets wipe out America's white trash majority.....I could do without seeing another episode of Jerry Springer anyway.
Perhaps it could be down to the pressure of 4km of ice causing sufficient heating at lower levels for freshwater to be liquid.
;)
But I'm no geologist (or physicist)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
2 - There are already thousands of deadly yet-unknown diseases lurking right here on the surface, in remote rainforests, waiting to be released by idiotic poacher.
Really? Can you substantiate this?
3 - So what? humanity will either evolve natural defenses,
Not in time we won't. The success of a selective force requires that unfit organisms not replicate, which implies that the soonest evolution will have an effect is the next generation.
There's a lot of stuff any given individual doesn't have immunity to. That's why we have an amazingly effective immune system, to create such immunity.
...of what scientists believe the life may look like down there.
Is it easier to deal with ice than venturing into deep sea? I have read that many interesting creatures are in deep sea where we cannot quite reach.
Either way, I'm equally excited to know that something else we don't know might be within reach, pretty much like others being excited by aliens.
Nice Fearmongering. Hmmm Let's see, story about possible unknown microbes. Nope not scary. Oh I know add terrorism to the mix.
Sheesh get a life
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
"This planet should host about 1 to 1.5 bn people comfortably and sustainably. Any more than that is too much."
On what do you base this? Idiot.
Technology is always improving. Before agriculture there must have been simpletons like you saying that the known earth could support 1 to 1.5 k people.
This planet should host about 1 to 1.5 bn people comfortably and sustainably. Any more than that is too much
I put the estimates closer to 100-500 billion. Yes, I pulled that number outta my ass just like you did yours.
I can live on about 1/10th of the food I currently eat. Just in the US alone that would feed an extra 2.9 billion people.
Multiply that times every other Westerner and you could feed pretty much everyone else on the planet with no problem. If you count the food being wasted on this planet, that's another 5-10 billion right there. Efficiency and irritation-style technology improvements would take care of the rest.
We currently waste a lot of space and resources so we don't have to live in the boring parts of the planet.
Just remember - every new supermicrobe is another potential blockbuster disaster movie.
There's more known nasty viruses and bacteria that have yet to be used in any harmful way. What makes you think a terrorist organization would be interested in visiting the Antarctic in the very remote hope that there could, possibly, be some kind of ancient bacteria... maybe?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The fact that it isn't saltwater isn't very surprising at all. Almost all glacial ice is freshwater. When saltwater is frozen for a very long time, the salt actually works its way out of the ice, leaving fresh water ice. Since the lake is in the middle of one huge, relatively old piece of ice it is not surprising at all that it is not salt water.
Also, it is not too peculiar that all the ice isn't melting. If you have a few small heat sources in the middle of several kilometers of ice, you'd expect it to melt a small area of ice around it. Since the heat requirements grows exponentially to melt a larger volume of ice and there are several kilometers of ice to melt, it would take a very large heat source to melt enough ice to either melt up to the surface or to the ocean.
<Bitching>I love how I press submit and get an error. I try it again and it tells me that I have to wait xx seconds before posting again. If I couldn't post due to an error, why do I have to wait to try again?</Bitching>
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
How theories evolve:
"???" and "Profit!" are left as an exercise for the reader.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Bottle it! Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. Let's siphon some off into lake Erie and see what happens..where'd I leave that roach..
If you're actually scared of that, you should probably live in fear of terrorists raiding your fridge.
Ahh in Australia our government is prepared for that, we got special Fridge Magnets
Do these microbes have to have any sort of host? For all we (here at /.) know they are completely harmless things similar to green algae. In fact that would be the more likely situation.
00110100 00110010
It seems, at least according to this Wikipedia entry, that there is not yet an scientific consensus on why Lake Vostok remains liquid.
Wikipedia: Lake Vostok.
This has huge scientific potential but not for the reasons most slashdotters are positing. For scientists studying the genome, it's largely about calibrating their evolutionary rulers, and less about super alien organisms.
Unlike large animals which can be geographically isolated and evolve undisturbed, free living microbes (as opposed to those that need a specific animal or plant host) probably range freely and easily by the fact that they carry easily on the wind or the skin of migrating animals or move with the major currents that circulate the globe. Even if only one microbe makes it to a local it can begin to reproduce, since it doesn't rely on sexual replication, it isn't inconvenienced by having to find a mate also flung into some far foreign environment.
All of this is to say, these microbes will have had what in microbe evolution is something fairly rare, an environment completely free from competition from other global varieties seeking to fill the same ecological niche. I doubt they will have mutated far from their other global cousins, but the rate of change of DNA is probably what really matters to scientists, as for long time periods we would only be making guesses about genomic drift in microbes.
Given the extreme environment these microbes inhabit, there may also be some extreamophile surprises for cold adaptation.
Another possible study will be how quickly the isolated community looses defenses to protozoa and other microscopic predators that may not now be present in their extremely isolated pocket of liquid water beneath the ice.
Letter To Iran
We do have a body temperature of 98.6 degrees when they have spent the last 500,000 years at near freezing.
1/10th's actually a fair number. Ranching Beef, for example is about 10% efficient. Every 1 lb steak you skip represents 10 lbs. of grain that could be available to feed people instead of cattle, IF we can work out ways to distribute it.
Who is John Cabal?
2 - There are already thousands of deadly yet-unknown diseases lurking right here on the surface, in remote rainforests, waiting to be released by idiotic poacher.
Really? Can you substantiate this?
SARS? From cherval cats in China, I think. Not exactly remote rainforests either.
If there is 2 Miles of Ice below Antarctica, does that mean that the surface is at 10,000+ ft?
Y'all got taken in. Obviously this "news" story is movie hype for Alien vs. Predator (8/15 release). If you had gone to the movies this weekend you would have seen the trailer (scientists find pyramid buried 1000s of feet under Antarctic ice cap, it contains Alien-style aliens which emerge from their pods and eat you.
Well let me turn this one around on you. Most "evil rich western" countries are rich precisely because they DONT HAVE BOOMING POPULATIONS. Most of the "developed world" suffers from lower fertility and an aging population that barely replaces itself. It's not because they've all decided to embrace zero population growth, it's because there is an inverse relationship between standard of living and the size of a family. (Standard of living is related to other things to, but there is a definite correlation here).
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
[AD 2015, RESEARCHERS FINALLY MANAGE TO MAKE CONTACT WITH ANCIENT MICROBES AT BOTTOM OF LAKE VOSTOK]
[MICROBES] So, what has the media been saying about us?
[RESEARCHER] Oh, well, I've got the newspaper articles right here..
[MICROBES] What? "Lake untouched for 500,000 years"? Is that all it's got to say? "Lake untouched for 500,000 years"! Five words!
[RESEARCHER] Well, there's an awful lot happening on earth, and only so much print space in the international media.. and no one knew much about the Lake Vostok of course.
[MICROBES] Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.
[RESEARCHER] Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a press release summarizing our research off to Reuters. They had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement.
[MICROBES] And what does it say now?
[RESEARCHER, SLIGHTLY EMBARRASED] "Lake mostly untouched for 500,000 years"
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Not to mention Ebola and HIV (probably a mutated version of SIV)...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Oh why even bother? It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
-kgj
We humans aren't going to have any immunity to these microbes that have been isolated for 500000 years.
Actually, the reverse is probably true. These things have been isolated from the wild wild world for so long they probably be no match for the predators that await them.
Any expensive evolutionary defenses and weapons will have been bred out as they are unneeded and wasteful.
Think about it logically, who are you going to be more afraid of meeting on the street, somebody who grew up shielded from the outside world thier entire life, given all the food and shelter they ever needed but no knowledge of how the world works, or somone who grew up on the mean streets of detroit having to fight every day just to survive?
There is a reason why you don't just toss your pets into the forest when you are done with them and expect them to survive the night. Things brought up without enemies are very very weak when confronted with new threats.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Is there room to do science without having any theory of the earth's (and universe's) origin?
Umm nope, any science done in ignorance (intentional or otherwise) or conditions preceding any experiments is bad science to say the least.
As to the age of lake, this is basically a very well educated guess, by taking core samples of the ice above and determining rate of ice growth or shrinkage and comparing against data from the same period, a guess can be made. If you want to check out info on carbon dating go here or for ice core dating try here.
No I'm not going to flame you for being religious.
What I am going to say is that Creation Science is in no way scientific. However, creationism is a theory of how things happened, just not a scientific one. (Science has become used to describe anything these days whether or not it uses scientific methodology (e.g. Political Science)).
The reason why creation can not be science is that it cannot be proven (or disproven). The theory of evolution focuses why it's true. Creationism tries to "prove" itself by disproving evolution rather by by its own merits (and thus win by default). Creationism is also extremely broad (every logical world could have been created with creationism, so it fails to explain why the world is this way and not some other way).
Let's get historical. A lot of people bash Darwin and haven't bothered to even read his books or know his arguments, so I'll use one he used. Darwin found that throughout his travels in the world there were never amphibians on islands surrounded by saltwater, unless introduced by humans (in which case they thrived). Darwin also knew that the amphibians died when they tried to swim in salt water. The most likely explanation was that since no frogs were there when the island formed, no frogs could ever be on the island since they couldn't swim. Creationim's explanation would be that God created amphibians on large land masses but not small ones because it was part of his plan. From there, I'd like to know how or why this is part of God's plan.
I don't see a good way of explaining why God decided that amphibians shouldn't be on oceanic islands.
There's many more examples like this. Let's not forget the theory of Gravity fails on the quantum level, but no one's about to discard it. Evolution isn't perfect, but without it, biology wouldn't exist (why would we believe that experiments on other animals would be relevant to humans? God could've created all the animals completely differently...but also could not have.)
Creationism is too broad and is compatible with any state of the world. As such, there's nothing one can find in the world to disprove it. Since it cannot be disproven, it's not a scientific theory.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Why aren't environmentalists up-in-arms about this type of arctic drilling? This is a pure, untouched ecosystem that's going to be contaminated by people for no real reason except for curiosity.
Don't those 500,000 year old microbes have just as many rights as the spotted owl, salmon, and those lizards in the West somewhere?
Stop this microbe genocide now, and prevent all drilling - whether it's for commerce (oil) or science!
This is a childish post and obvious troll/flamebait. Please stop moderating such worthless posts up. And yes, I had mod points before posting this.
I couldn't find an easier job, so I just signed up for the first winter over at Dome C on the high Antarctic Plateau, only 550km from Vostok. On the program of the fun will be: reaching ground level with a 3200m ice core (they are almost there), temperatures of -84C in winter and lots more. Unlike Vostok, Dome C doesn't have a lake underneath. I'll try to keep my site updated.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
They might be excited at the idea of two isolated environments with a known time of divergence from a common base. It provides a very nice test bed for various observations about evolution, if they really have been seperated for an extended period of time from each other and the outside world both.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Pour salt on it for christ's sake
Lots and lots and lots and lots of salt
The let the rain wash the slime away
There are those who would argue that teachings that have 'an a priori commitment to naturalism' are just as religious as those who have an a priori commitment to supernatural creation.
Steven Jay Gould communicated the idea above - an affirmation of Lewontin's assertion. Gould concluded that Macroevolution has a strong foundation in naturalism - a philosophy that specifically excludes anything supernatural - and therefore excludes God. This seems to me to be as much of a religious belief as that of creationism.
In case you are not aware, ther recently deceased Gould (May 02) was one of the most intelligent and eloquent proponents of evolution in the present day. He developed the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution to compensate for the gaps in the fossil record. He was not on the fringe of evolutionary theory. I believe that his view is consistent with the majority of scientists who are evolutionists.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
First, In America, there are a lot of individuals that are putting on airs, and they have this idea that acting like foreigners (mainly European) makes them better than the rest of us. Second, we have Corporate America selling us that idea that to be more sophisticated, we must drink bottled water (once again, gross generalization, like the Europeans). These corporations then take the water from their tap, put it in a bottle and sell it to us at 50% more than what they charge for taking that same water adding a lot of extra chemicals (in addition to what is already in the water when it came out of the tap) and a bunch of sugar and then carbonating it. So, by preying on peoples self images, these companies are taking that cost them almost nothing and making a mint on it instead of actually putting forth the effort of actually making something and selling it. Thanks for helping Corporate America make another sale.
Folks, if you want to look sophisticated and put on airs, buy a bottle of water and refill it from your sink for the next 6 months.
If you really want water without the chemicals, buy a filter for your tap, they look expensive, but they are a lot cheaper than bottled water.
I will not argue that 'water' is good for you, but I will argue against 'bottled water' (in general) being better for you than tap water. Over here it's the same thing for the most part. Oh, and the 'shit' with sugar in it, well, at least they are doing something that might actually justify charging for the product.
'And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo Every day you meet quite a few...'