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Sub-Ice Antarctic Lake Vida Abounds With Life
ananyo writes "It is permanently covered by a massive cap of ice up to 27 metres thick, is six times saltier than normal sea water, and at 13 C is one of the coldest aquatic environments on Earth — yet Lake Vida in Antarctica teems with life. Scientists drilling into the lake have found abundant and diverse bacteria, including at least one new phylum (full paper (PDF)). The find increases the chances that life may exist (or have once existed) on planets such as Mars and moons such as Jupiter's Europa."
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A great adventure game idea has been bugging me for some years, related to this. Antarctica is actually a huge ice plateau, at least 1km thick. I imagined a game in which the player discovers that Atlantis is hidden beneath that 1km thick ice. The people there live assuming that the outer world is post-apocalyptic, destroyed by a massive meteor.
Well, if someday I develop this game, you know the spoilers already.
first
And that's because the article says -13C and not +13C which is quite a bit of difference. It'd be cool if the editors actually did their editing work ;-)
"... and at -13 C is one of the coldest aquatic environments ..."
Lake Vida was cool before it was hot.
Nazi bases in the arctic and alien wars.
The find increases the chances that life may exist (or have once existed) on planets such as Mars and moons such as Jupiter's Europa.
So life on other planets is dependent on our knowledge? Sounds doubtful. It may increase our reason to believe that such life is possible, but not whether that life actual exists/existed.
This has been a known fact for decades. I don't understand how this is news.
Sorry, Sony. You know it's true.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Attempt no landing there, ya douchebag!
They only drilled into it this year. This couldn't have been known for years. its' been separated from the normal biome for hundreds if not millions of years.
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EDIT: ...hundreds of thousands if not millions... Also read as several interglacials.
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EDIT: Never mind. I got this confused with Vostok, which actually has been drilled into this year. First reports are that Vostok is devoid of life, but that is only on initial inspection. I thought this article as a correction to that.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
All these worlds
are yours except
EUROPA
attempt no
landing there
let's hope they won't dig up any shoggoths...
It in no way increases the chance of finding life in those places.
It merely increases our perception of the chance of finding life.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Antarctica wasn't always icebound. Once it would have been filled with life until plate tectonics moved it to the south pole. So there is a significant difference to the likes of Mars and moons orbiting the gas giants in that life under the ice first evolved under different conditions somewhere else and has adapted to the changing conditions as the land iced over.
When we don't know how likely something is, we assume probability of 50%.
So, there is a 50% probability that there are horses somewhere else in the universe. Similarly there is a 50% probability of cows. Carry this on for as many farm animals as you can think of. That means it is a statistical certainty that there is at least one planet somewhere that has at least one farm animal because:
p = 1 - .5 x .5 x .5 ....
It's not like the life there has a choice of where to live.
2800 years doesn't sound like a very long time for this lake to have had it's ice cap. 2800 years ago is still well within the range of human history! It's nothing to geology! So.. how was the lake uncapped 2800 years ago? I know that Antarctica was in a warmer, higher latitude before it moved to the polar region but 2800 years of continental drift should be what, between 100 and 1000 feet? Was there a warming trend back then even bigger than the one today? I wouldn't think there would be all that much evolution even during that short a time so if so the species we know survived it. That revelation sounds like a global warming denier field day! I'm not trying to hand them any arguments, I'm only trying to ask the question. What happened ~2800 years ago?
Everywhere we've looked on this planet, including sulfuric volcanic fissures miles under the surface, where there's water we've found life. Clearly this planet is infested with it.
At some point finding life in a weird new liquid water-based environment on Earth has to cease being news.
The summary title seems to come from the Department of Redundancy Department. :)
TFA has the correct -13C, which is much more believable as "one of the coldest aquatic environments on Earth". For Americans 13C would be 55.4F, and -13C is 8.6F or 23.4F below freezing.
And for the nerds 13C would be 286.15K whereas -13C is 260.15K
The REAL nerds would have thought 13 C referred to 3897301930.6 meters per second.
The find increases the chances that life may exist (or have once existed) on planets such as Mars and moons such as Jupiter's Europa.
Isn't the find kind of irrelevant to the chances that life exists elsewhere? It's like saying that, if I lose two socks and find one 3 years later, then I therefore have an increased chance of finding the second sock sooner rather than later. The first has nothing to do with the second. The existence of life in one place on Earth has little to do with chances of finding life elsewhere, since they're two independent events.
"The find increases the chances that life may exist (or have once existed) on planets such as Mars and moons such as Jupiter's Europa."
Yeah, I wouldn't count on that. Life may be able to adapt to extreme environments, but I have serious doubts about it "spawning" in permanent sub-freezing conditions. Nevermind that we still have no idea whether or not life is unique to Earth. Let's not forget that the Antarctic once straddled the equator, giving life a chance to take hold, then adapt over its slow southward slide to the pole. And what djh2400 said.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
The BBC article goes into more detail:
So this is not just a deep freeze; this is an extremely hostile environment for life, even by our current understanding of extremophiles.
And this is why we need to be sending missions to the under-ice oceans of Europa or the hydrocarbon lakes of Titan, not yet another rock-hunting mission.
"The find increases the chances that life may exist"...
I don't think any find here on Earth can increase chances anywhere else.
The chances of life existing elsewhere is unchanging. Regardless of what humans discover.
I think it just increases the hope of those wishing for the discovery life on other planets.
I personally think it's a false hope, although I'd be excited to be proven wrong.
I also think it's dangerous to rely on a belief in life on other planets, as far as we know life here is rare and unique, and the idea that we can trash this planet, and escape to other worlds as a plausible scenario, or that we can erase all or some life here, and believe that life still exists elsewhere, stands a chance of being tragically incorrect.