Drilling Begins At Lake Hidden Beneath Antarctic

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Drilling Begins At Lake Hidden Beneath Antarctic

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 13, 2012 @10:49AM from the new-places-to-advertise dept.

New submitter stonetony writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "A team of 12 scientists and engineers has begun work at remote Lake Ellsworth. They are using a high-pressure hose and sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through more than two miles of ice. The aim is to analyse ice waters isolated for up to 500,000 years. The team of 12 scientists and engineers is using sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through the ice to waters isolated for up to half a million years. The process of opening a bore-hole is expected to last five days and will be followed by a rapid sampling operation before the ice refreezes."

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How are they doing this... by msauve · 2012-12-13 10:52 · Score: 4, Funny

Is there any chance that they're using sterile water heated to almost the boiling point to melt a passage through ice to get to water isolated for up to 5e5 years?

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1. Re:How are they doing this... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-13 10:59 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  i would say there is a good chance that they're using sterile water heated to almost the boiling point to melt a passage through ice to get to water isolated for up to 5e5 years
2. Re:How are they doing this... by Ambiguous+Coward · 2012-12-13 11:09 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  You're all missing the point that they're using water near 100C to bore through ice to get at water that's been isolated for as much as 500 millennia.
  
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  Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
3. Re:How are they doing this... by muon-catalyzed · 2012-12-13 11:15 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  sterile or not, isolated for 500,000 years.., now is the time to open Pandora's ice box, 21.12.2012 is approaching.
  
  /s
4. Re:How are they doing this... by Twigmon · 2012-12-13 12:46 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Indeed, however, this is a dupe of this post: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/12/13/2126234/drilling-begins-at-lake-hidden-beneath-antarctic
5. Re:How are they doing this... by Ambiguous+Coward · 2012-12-13 13:48 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Let it be known that I was actually moderated "-1 Redundant" on this. The irony is palpable.
  
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  Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
6. Re:How are they doing this... by TheLink · 2012-12-13 15:29 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  The moderators screwed up. Should be +5 redundant.
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  Too many replies beneath your current threshold
Questions from the summary by orson_of_fort_worth · 2012-12-13 10:53 · Score: 5, Funny

The summary wasn't clear so my questions are: Is the water sterilized? How hot is the water in the hose? How long has the lake water been isolated? Also, Is the water sterilized? How hot is the water in the hose? How long has the lake water been isolated?
1. Re:Questions from the summary by Ambiguous+Coward · 2012-12-13 11:11 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  1) Yes
  2) Almost boiling!
  3) 500,000 years
  4) Indeed
  5) Nearly 100 degrees celsius
  6) 500 millennia
  
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  Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Great summary by Janek+Kozicki · 2012-12-13 10:55 · Score: 3, Funny

I dodn't even need to red it twice to see that a team of scientists is using is sterilised water at near boiling point.

Indeed; using sterilised water at near boiling point.

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Re:Mayans by AaronLS · 2012-12-13 11:50 · Score: 4, Funny

Maybe it's not a drill bit at all, but some sort of really hot water. I'm not really sure though.
Re:Cthulhu - Just in time by AaronLS · 2012-12-13 11:58 · Score: 4, Insightful

If not, someone should perhaps start some projects like this, such that doomsday cults funnel their money into useful research projects. Win-win for everyone, unless the cult turns out to be right.
Now we know... by Local+ID10T · 2012-12-13 12:27 · Score: 3, Informative

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
You took the words right out of my mouth!
Now we know what the Mayans were predicting:
The scientists wake Cthulhu, R'lyeh rises, and the world ends.

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oblig by kid_wonder · 2012-12-13 13:37 · Score: 3, Funny

in soviet russia the summary repeats the summary ..
oh wait a seco...

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Title arriving: by smittyoneeach · 2012-12-13 14:07 · Score: 4, Funny

"Ode to a Small Lump of Greenish Water that Turned to into Putty I Found in my Antarctic Pit That I Reached Using Slightly Sub-Gaseous Phase Water One Midsummer Morning, Which Turned Out to be Cthulhu's Placenta, There in His R'lyeh Prison, Turning What was Going to be my Nobel Prize Science Project into a Sudden Descent into Eldricht Helllllllllllaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahah theMayansDidIttheMayansDidIttheMayansDidIttheMayansDidIt!!!!!!!! "

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Re:Redux? by dargaud · 2012-12-13 22:15 · Score: 3, Informative

Well, technically the russians haven't quite breached the lake. It's ongoing right now and here's what I've followed so far:
The layer of ice just above the lake is refrozen water (and not compressed snow from above). They already analyzed that without finding anything significant (a US lab found lots of stuff but the word is that it's all contaminated DNA, a french lab found only one candidate piece of DNA, that ice is 10 times cleaner than the cleanest water we can make in a lab).
So a few days ago the russians breached the last remaining ice after using a sterilized drill. They then withdrew the drill and immediately lowered the pressure of the drilling fluid, allowing the water of the lake to raise into the hole for 600 meters. This water froze quickly. Now they are drilling again this freshly frozen ice which will be analyzed in a special very clean lab. I just don't know how they can drill again 600m of ice without deviating more than 10cm (the diameter of the core).
Official results should start coming in about a month.

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