OK....Soviet scientists are tunneling through 15000 ft. of Antarctic Ice to get to frozen Lake Vostok....They are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved in the times before the ice age....riiiighhttt...
Maybe they should have reviewed the 1982 movie " THE THING" by John Carpenter
The overview of that movie - "An American scientific expedition to the frozen wastes of the Antarctic is interrupted by a group of seemingly mad Norwegians pursuing and shooting a dog. The helicopter pursuing the dog crashes leaving no explanation for the chase. During the night, the dog mutates and attacks other dogs in the cage and members of the team that investigate."
Maybe they should have reviewed the 1982 movie " THE THING" by John Carpenter
The overview of that movie - "An American scientific expedition to the frozen wastes of the Antarctic is interrupted by a group of seemingly mad Norwegians pursuing and shooting a dog. The helicopter pursuing the dog crashes leaving no explanation for the chase. During the night, the dog mutates and attacks other dogs in the cage and members of the team that investigate."
The team soon realises that an alien life-form with the ability to take over other bodies is on the loose and they don't know who may already have been taken over."
Oh yeah, I'd want to drill through an ice cap better than 2 1/2 miles deep to see what is down there or what may still be there...especially after reading that.
They should have listened to YODA -
Luke Skywalker: I won't fail you. I'm not afraid.
Oh yeah, I'd want to drill through an ice cap better than 2 1/2 miles deep to see what is down there or what may still be there...especially after reading that.
They should have listened to YODA -
Luke Skywalker: I won't fail you. I'm not afraid.
Yoda: You will be. You... will... be.
Scientists Race To Breach Antarctica's Lake Vostok
Redorbit.com
Posted on: Saturday, 5 February 2011, 07:48 CST
Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years.
Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.
With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out on February 6. “It's minus 40 (Celsius/Fahrenheit) outside,” said Turkeyev. “But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon.”
Scientists are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved in the times before the ice age. The lake could also offer scientists a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extremes on Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.
“It's like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don't know what we'll find,” Valery Lukin of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the expedition, told Reuters.
The discovery of the hidden network of sub-glacial lakes of Antarctica in the 1990s has sparked much enthusiasm among scientists the world over.
Explorers from the US and Britain are following the trail of Russia’s scientists with their own missions to probe other buried lakes, which are among the last of the world’s hidden and unexplored areas.
“It's an extreme environment but it is one that may be habitable. If it is, curiosity drives us to understand what's in it. How is it living? Is it flourishing?,” Martin Siegert, head of the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences, who is leading a British expedition to a smaller polar lake, told Reuters reporter Alissa de Carbonnel.
Experts explain that the ice sheet traps in the planet’s geothermal heat and prevents the lakes from freezing. Sediment from the lake might show scientists a window to the past, back millions of years to tropical prehistoric times, said Lukin.
Lake Vostok is the largest, deepest and most isolated of the frozen continent’s 150 sub-glacial lakes. It is overly saturated with oxygen, more so than any other known environment on Earth.
John Priscu of Montana State University, a chief scientist with the U.S. program to explore another Antarctic lake, said Russian scientists are “leading the way with a torch.”
Priscu said beneath the frozen crust, far from any sunlight, in the vast sub-glacial lake creatures may lurk around thermal vents in the lake’s depths. “I think Lake Vostok is an oasis under the ice sheet for life. It would be really wild to thoroughly sample... But until we learn how to get into the system cleanly that's an issue,” he told Reuters.
Explorers, about to breach the lake for the first time, now face an important question: How do we go where no one has gone before without spoiling it or bringing back some foreign virus?
“I feel very excited but once we do it there is no going back,” said Alexei Ekaikin, a scientist with the expedition at Vostok Station. “Once you touch it, it will be touched forever
Scientists Race To Breach Antarctica's Lake Vostok
Redorbit.com
Posted on: Saturday, 5 February 2011, 07:48 CST
Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years.
Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.
With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out on February 6. “It's minus 40 (Celsius/Fahrenheit) outside,” said Turkeyev. “But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon.”
Scientists are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved in the times before the ice age. The lake could also offer scientists a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extremes on Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.
“It's like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don't know what we'll find,” Valery Lukin of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the expedition, told Reuters.
The discovery of the hidden network of sub-glacial lakes of Antarctica in the 1990s has sparked much enthusiasm among scientists the world over.
Explorers from the US and Britain are following the trail of Russia’s scientists with their own missions to probe other buried lakes, which are among the last of the world’s hidden and unexplored areas.
“It's an extreme environment but it is one that may be habitable. If it is, curiosity drives us to understand what's in it. How is it living? Is it flourishing?,” Martin Siegert, head of the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences, who is leading a British expedition to a smaller polar lake, told Reuters reporter Alissa de Carbonnel.
Experts explain that the ice sheet traps in the planet’s geothermal heat and prevents the lakes from freezing. Sediment from the lake might show scientists a window to the past, back millions of years to tropical prehistoric times, said Lukin.
Lake Vostok is the largest, deepest and most isolated of the frozen continent’s 150 sub-glacial lakes. It is overly saturated with oxygen, more so than any other known environment on Earth.
John Priscu of Montana State University, a chief scientist with the U.S. program to explore another Antarctic lake, said Russian scientists are “leading the way with a torch.”
Priscu said beneath the frozen crust, far from any sunlight, in the vast sub-glacial lake creatures may lurk around thermal vents in the lake’s depths. “I think Lake Vostok is an oasis under the ice sheet for life. It would be really wild to thoroughly sample... But until we learn how to get into the system cleanly that's an issue,” he told Reuters.
Explorers, about to breach the lake for the first time, now face an important question: How do we go where no one has gone before without spoiling it or bringing back some foreign virus?
“I feel very excited but once we do it there is no going back,” said Alexei Ekaikin, a scientist with the expedition at Vostok Station. “Once you touch it, it will be touched forever
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