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."

Comments

Maybe

[wideBlueSkies]

It's really one giant organism in the process of dividing....

wbs.

Re:Maybe

[ThisIsFred]

That would be so sweet. I'd pay good money to see the Antarctic mega-organism have it out with that monster fungus in Oregon.

Re:Maybe

[lonesome phreak]

Cthulhu sleeps under an island (Pohnpei) in the South Pacific. Off http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com:

"Co-ordinates of S. Latitude 47 9, W. Longitude 126 43 have been stated by Lovecraft but never investigated. August Derleth used the co-ordinates of S. Latitude 49 51, W. Longitude 128 34 in his own writings. The latter also places it about a day's journey from Pohnpei, an actual island of the area, which consequently plays a central part in the Cthulhu Mythos."

Also noted "The island is notable for the prevalence of the extreme form of color blindness. Maskun is a medical condition (also called achromatopsia) characterized by the inability to perceive any colors, a severe and rare form of color blindness. It is caused by the lack of any functioning cone cells in the retina; these are the light receptors responsible for color perception. It is endemic on Pohnpei and was described by Oliver Sacks in Island of the Colorblind. Sacks went there with a Dane who had maskun, and the book narrates his experiences on the island. Maskun is relatively rare in humans but often shows up in communities with small gene-pools.

Strange stuff no doubt.

Re:Careful

[ResidntGeek]

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?

Re:Careful

[Roland Piquepaille]

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.

Define "Ancient"

[toxic666]

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!

Re:Define "Ancient"

[dragons_flight]

Actually 500,000 years maybe a significant understatement. Antarctica has been continuously glaciated for the last ~40 million years. We know that the lake is at least 500,000 years old because that is roughly the age of the ice directly above it. However, as with all glaciers, the ice slowly creeps from the central domes where snow accumulates out the ocean where icebergs form and the edges melt. Hence, it is pretty certain that the ice above Vostok today is not the ice that was there when the lake first formed.

This opens the possibility that the lake may have existed continuously under the ice for 20 or 30 million years. Till we crack her open and look inside it will be hard to say.

Re:Careful

[__aagctu1952]

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.

Re:Careful

[ByteSlicer]

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)...

Does anyone else find it amazing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Does anyone else find it amazing...

[BlueJay465]

As for the geothermal theory, if it was the cause of this under-ice lake, then the convection current would have eventually blended the two basins.

I remain skeptical.

Re:Does anyone else find it amazing...

[dragons_flight]

Your guess is basically right. The lakes under Antarctica exist because of a balance between the slow trickle of geothermal heat and the insulating qualities of kilometers of ice.

You may be aware that as one digs down into the Earth it starts to get hotter. This is because everywhere on the Earth there is a slow trickle of ambient geothermal energy being dissipated from the hot core out to the much cooler surface. This should not be mistaken for much more intense geothermal phenomena like volcanos and hot springs as they have nothing to do with most subglacial lakes.

Since everywhere on Earth a little bit of geothermal heat is being released (roughly 1% of the power/area of sunshine) this includes the bottoms of glaciers. This causes the bottoms of ice sheets to always be warmer than their tops. For most glaciers this is only a few degrees, and no cares, but as the ice sheet grows, the ice can eventually become so thick that it can't dissipate the geothermal energy effectively and the bottom will melt. This is responsible for the majority of subglacial Antarctic lakes.

Re:Careful

[Roland Piquepaille]

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.

I'm looking forward to...

[Scoria]

... Vostok bottled water, a pleasant alternative to Evian. ;-)

Re:I'm looking forward to...

[Landaras]

Am I the only one who finds it fitting that Evian is "naive" backwards?

- Neil Wehneman

Europa testing

[Killshot]

They should use this lake to test ideas for drilling into the ice of Europa.

Re:Europa testing

[Pinkfud]

That's already in the works. Don't you follow the Science Channel? :) Seriously, they are planning to test methods of drilling on Europa there. The problem is to get it done without introducing any microbes into the water, because then their findings would be contaminated and useless. So they're working very carefully on the design of the devices they're going to use.

Re:Careful

[wideBlueSkies]

>>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.

Re:Careful

[Paulrothrock]

Unless your body temperature is below zero and its latent pressure is the equivalent of being buried 10km under ice, I don't think you'll have a problem.

Oblig. Reply: "But I'm Mr. Freeze you insensitive clod!"

Re:So...

[wideBlueSkies]

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.

Re:Careful

[idiot900]

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.

I found a picture...

[squidfrog]

...of what scientists believe the life may look like down there.

Ice vs Deep Sea

[powerpuffgirls]

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.

Re:Careful

[mr.scoot]

We humans aren't going to have any immunity to these microbes that have been isolated for 500000 years. I hope whoever's studying these lakes takes appropriate precautions against both accidental release and theft by terrorist organizations.

Just remember - every new supermicrobe is another potential blockbuster disaster movie.

Not really

[i8a4re]

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>

Re:how old?

[pyrrhonist]

How do the scientists determine this in a way using the scientific method?

How theories evolve:

1. Observe how ice accumulates.
2. Take core sample.
3. Compare with observations.
4. Count accumlated ice.
5. Craft beautiful research paper about the observations taken at the lake using careful measuments and research dating back almost 100 years culminating in theory that Lake Vostok is probably beneath about 500,000 years worth of ice give or take + or - 5%.
6. Get forced to summerize paper to PR.
7. Read spin in paper, "Lake untouched for 500,000 years!"
8. Cry.

"???" and "Profit!" are left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Maybe its pressure?

[another_henry]

I don't think that's necessarily true... This explanation makes sense - the water does expand at freezing point, but contracts again as it continues to get colder. Unless it's a particularly sunny part of the antarctic, I think it would be cold enough that the whole lot could freeze. I'd put my bets on geothermal.

Re:Careful

[cranos]

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

Re:Careful

[Phoex]

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.

To quell some of the speculation

[saforrest]

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.

Re:To quell some of the speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest that the Wikipedia entry is misleading, if not incorrect.

The lake remains liquid for two reasons:

(1) geothermal heat (flux): using a conservative estimate of the geothermal heat flux of the East Antarctic (which has never been measured directly), say 50 mW/m^2, the measured ice thickness in the area (via radio-echo sounding, or active seimic) of ~ 4000 m^2, thermal conductivity of ice ~2.3 W/m K, and mean annual surface temperautre of ~ -55C suggests that the base of the ice sheet should be at the melting point. Ah, the heat equation in 1-D!

(2) freezing point depression changes the phase transition at Vostok from 0C to ~ -3C. A small but significant correction. Other corrections involve advection in the ice column due to ice flow, the ~110 m of firn overlying the glacial ice, etc. None of these corrections change the conclusion derived from (1), above.

The ice adjacent to the lake is also at the melting point, as are many areas in both East and West Antarctica. Whether the melt water collects into a subglacial lake is determined by the local hydraulic gradient. In many places, basal melt water flows along the gradient and refreezes where the ice thickness decreses. In other place, water collects into lakes. There are ~70 subglacial lakes in the Antarctic, although none nearly as large as Lake Vostok.

A temperature change 5000 years ago will have essentially no influence on the basal ice temperature at Vostok, in contrast to what Wikipedia suggests. The thermal diffusivity is far too slow, and the accumulation rate at the surface is also too small to generate rapid enough thermal vertical advecion.

Cheers,
tom

Half a Million is LONG for a microbe.

[DumbSwede]

Half a million years is pretty long in this context, especially for organisms that can potentially reproduce quite frequently or have dozens if not hundreds of generations per year (even thousands).

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.

Re:Half a Million is LONG for a microbe.

[toxic666]

I fully agree with your comments. The oil fields have microbes that are hundreds of millions of years old, uniquely evolved to their environment and may have evolved from the microbes that were in the original, surficial organic muck.

My original point was that /. editors tend to have a point of view that coincides with NASA funding requests based upon a search for life as justification. Describing a 500,000 year-old environment as "ancient" suggests something unique.

Re:Half a Million is LONG for a microbe.

[Quirk]

Oil fields and microbes come from a theory held by a maverick scientist by the name of Thomas Gold. The gist of his argument ran as follows: "The presence of organic molecules in all petroleum deposits has long been taken as evidence for the biological origin of petroleum. Gold argued instead in his 1999 book The Deep Hot Biosphere that the organic molecules come from subterranean microbes that feed on petroleum deep in the Earth's crust. Gold's vision of a supply of oil and gas that is essentially inexhaustible drew intense criticism from petroleum geologists."

Re:Half a Million is LONG for a microbe.

[CreatureComfort]

Actually creatures as large as humans are probably impossible in this environment. To have large animals, you need a relatively large supply of smaller animals/plants that reproduce quickly enough to be eaten and keep the large animal supplied with food/energy. (If you posit smaller animals, the same applies all the way down the food chain until you get to plants.) To have a large supply of plant life to feed the rest of the food chain, there has to be a large energy input into the system. For most of the earth this source is the sun. For Lake Vostok, buried under 4 miles of ice, I doubt that much sunlight ever makes it down there. There may be geothermal vents, which could introduce a lot of energy, but even so they would be very localized, and not suitable for powering a large food chain that would include large animals.

Re:Maybe its pressure?

[Anonymous Coward]

The water may contract as it gets colder, but because it is under so much pressure from 2 miles of ice above it, the water freezes at a lower temperature. As pressure increases, the freezing point of water decreases. I just don't know how much pressure would be needed to keep the water a liquid at whatever the temperature is at that depth. It is most likely a combination of geothermal heat and the effects of pressure on the freezing point of water.

Re:Careful

[Artifakt]

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.

2 Miles of Ice?

[kevlar]

If there is 2 Miles of Ice below Antarctica, does that mean that the surface is at 10,000+ ft?

Re:2 Miles of Ice?

[dragons_flight]

The average height is ~8,000 ft above sea level (far higher than any other continent). The weight of the ice depresses the ground so that most of the bedrock is technically below sea level.

Gotcha!!

[mbstone]

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.

Re:Careful

[beakburke]

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).

Re:how old?

[mcc]

[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"

Re:how old?

[cfuse]

I've studied creation science (science without evolutionary assumtions) and ...

Oh why even bother? It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Gulag Ice Lens

[handy_vandal]

From the preface to The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhensitsyn:

"In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream -- and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot."

Links

Re:Careful

[gnovos]

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.

Creationism isn't Science, but is an explanation

[Prien715]

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.

Going there soon

[dargaud]

Here's a radar map of Lake Vostok showing the Vostok russian Station, along with other radar maps of Antarctica.

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.

Oh please...

[Trikenstein]

It's just a giant slug

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