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?
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.
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?
... 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?
Just remember - every new supermicrobe is another potential blockbuster disaster movie.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
Oh why even bother? It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
-kgj
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.