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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."
Oh, like "1.0688 kilometers" is any rounder than "3500 feet".
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"A secondary borehole that acts as a well, its water back-pumped into the main hole after being filtered and sterilized, was started a night earlier, Priscu told Earther"
I'm glad they had the foresight to sterilize the water that would ultimately mix with the lake. Not doing so would have been just plain sad and stupid. (and counterproductive, if the goal was really to survey what was down there and *only* what was down there.)
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:
Mercer Lake information:
Lake Vostok is much larger:
Good luck, colleagues.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Sounds like the plot of a Syfy movie. Scientists dig a hole, unleash a long-dormant virus that kills half of humanity until Tara Reid comes in and saves the day while saying a bunch of really long and meaningless but technical sounding words that she can barely pronounce.
And then a shark flies in from behind and is about to eat her when the screen cuts to black.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Could be it was 1 km, but they rounded it up to be 3500 feet.
Should read "Scientists violated and contaminated a the last remaining pristine wilderness ecosystem untouched by the ravages of modern civilization."
That's how it would read if it was anything other than scientists, such as an oil exploration company searching for oil.
The Great Mystery! Spoiler - they will find exactly what they found in the other lake 13km away, give or take a few changes so inconsequential that about only 30 people on the planet will care about them and 1 person will be excited about them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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"...scientists are stoked..."
bitchin' bro!! check out this sample
gnarly!!!
Lake Mercer is 64 miles wide, more than 30 feet deep. I think whatever small amount of sterilized water (melted from antarctic ice mind!) makes it in from the borehole is not going to have much of an effect...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley