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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."
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 ;-)
Yeah, the Wiki-Page talks about -13C (9F). Typo?
"... and at -13 C is one of the coldest aquatic environments ..."
Isn't that the plot of at least a Stargate-Episode, a movie and (I think) an Outer Limits Episode?!
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
Lake Vida was cool before it was hot.
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.
Apologies - typo in my submission.
Sorry, Sony. You know it's true.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
And a plotline from that shitty Patrick Duffy show from the 70's, and probably a few Aquaman retcons too.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
EDIT: ...hundreds of thousands if not millions... Also read as several interglacials.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
...of mostly water
Dallas?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
There are few new things imagined by anyone. Most stories are rehashes of old stories, often mashups of all stories. How many versions of Romeo and Juliet are there, only with different names, different wordings, different characters' characteristics, time settings, etc?
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Is it the high salt concentration...?
You hit the nail in the head.
Stargate? Kind of but no. There were ruins but Atlantis had been moved long ago and nobody lived there and nobody thought the world outside the ice was destroyed.
It's not like the life there has a choice of where to live.
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 ....
Simple mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be zero. Why? Well given that the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is as close to zero as makes no odds, therefore we can round the average population of the Universe to zero, and so the total population must be zero.
Thank you Douglas Adams:-)
No, I can remember an episode where SG-1 is trapped (and a little bit brainwashed) to work in a big city underneath a thick layer of ice. Told that they would be the only survivors of an apocalypse on the surface...which was a lie, of course. Star Trek Voyager did a copy of the episode where the crew was working in a big city. Can't find the episode right now, though.
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?
You're both right. There were at least 2 episodes regarding the former site of Atlantis in Antarctica, and there was also the slave labor episode. I could look them up, but they're boxed away at the moment.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
I thought rehashing At the Mountains of Madness as Prometheus was pretty ballsy.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You hit the nacl in the head.
There FTFY.
For once that Fahrenheit unit is kinda useful, you could at least use it!
0F is more or less the coldest temperature you can achieve for a liquid mix of salt and water under standard pressure.
So it's entirely possible for a salt lake to have an average temperature of 9F.
The summary title seems to come from the Department of Redundancy Department. :)
"First, assume we start with a spherical chicken..."
John
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.
Rrrrrrright... Fahrenheit...
Why not put it in Rankine, Delisle, Newton, Réaumur and Rømer as well? Only the 'Merkens use Fahrenheit for god knows what reason. Maybe they cling onto it so they keep the brains sharp. Converting 3/7 cubic inch to gallon by head is just difficult... And more useful than sudoku's if I may add.
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_conversion_formulas
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
"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.
Or 8.113962545 x 10^19 e ...
How is that useful? The kind of person that remembers the lowest temperature at which liquid brine can exist under standard pressure should have no problem remembering the number -13 as well.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
"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.
I meant typo in the summary, not the Wikipedia-Article.
For once that Fahrenheit unit is kinda useful, you could at least use it!
Fahrenheit is a VERY useful scale, for humans (that is what it was designed for) I wouldn't go so far as to claim "for once .. kinda useful" in terms of science.