Scientists Drill Into 3,500 Feet of Ice To Reach a Mysterious Antarctic Lake (gizmodo.com)

Late last week, a team of about 50 scientists, drillers, and support staff successfully punched through nearly 4,000 feet of ice to access an Antarctic subglacial lake for just the second time in human history. From a report: On Friday, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) team announced they'd reached Lake Mercer after melting their way through an enormous frozen river with a high-pressure, hot-water drill. The multi-year effort to tap into the subglacial lake -- one of approximately 400 scientists have detected across Antarctica -- offers a rare opportunity to study the biology and chemistry of the most isolated ecosystems on Earth. The only other subglacial lake humans have drilled into -- nearby Lake Whillans, sampled in 2013 -- demonstrated that these extreme environments can play host to diverse microbial life. Naturally, scientists are stoked to see what they'll find lurking in Lake Mercer's icy waters. "We don't know what we'll find," John Priscu, a biogeochemist at Montana State University and chief scientist for SALSA, told Earther via satellite phone from the SALSA drill camp on the Whillans Ice Plain. "We're just learning, it's only the second time that this has been done."

Comments

Re:System upgrade

[hey!]

Oh, like "1.0688 kilometers" is any rounder than "3500 feet".

First one was Lake Vostok

[mapkinase]

I remember I had really high hopes only to be utterly disappointed. There was no real insight into prokaryotic science from the effects of such long ecosystem separation.

I again have really high hopes with this one. Mercer Lake does not even have a bloody Wiki page. [RAGE].

I predict that I will be utterly disappointed.

Lake Vostok isolation time:

The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15[7][8] to 25 million years

Mercer Lake information:

Lake Mercer was first detected via satellite more than a decade ago, but it's never been explored by humans. The subglacial lake measures about 62 square miles (160 square kilometers ) in size, which is over twice the size of Manhattan. But it's not very deep—just 30 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) at its deepest points.

Lake Vostok is much larger:

Measuring 250 km (160 mi) long by 50 km (30 mi) wide at its widest point[1], it covers an area of 12,500 km2 (4,830 sq mi) making it the 16th largest lake by surface area. With an average depth of 432 m (1,417 ft), it has an estimated volume of 5,400 km3 (1,300 cu mi).[2] making it the 6th largest lake by volume.

Good luck, colleagues.

Re:Not possible

[hey!]

To my knowledge, no mainstream model has ever predicted that the South Pole would be ice free in our lifetimes. Even in scenarios where the Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, there's still going to be snow and ice at the South Pole, where summer highs are around -26C.

As for the Arctic, climate change there a bit like changing the odds on a lottery from one in million to one in ten. It will still take you a few years to hit the jackpot, but sooner or later you will. The first time sea ice drops below the million square km benchmark we'll be looking at an extreme weather event (hitting the lottery) on top of a long term climate trend (raising the lottery payoff odds). Nobody can say when that will happen, but the odds are unquestionably shifting. IPCC "middle of the road" models predict the first such event will likely come in the 2040s, but that's a statistical estimate. Even after we have our first "ice free" (< 10^6 km^2) year, that doesn't mean every year or even most years will be ice free, because that first year is going to be an outlier.

Don't be fooled by people who cherry pick a prior outlier like 2007 and say "Sea ice hasn't declined in 10 years!", or who conflate antarctic winter sea ice trends with arctic summer sea ice. The polar regions are changing.