Euroweek: Debt capital markets, November 18 2011
18 November, 2011Immortality: what a terrible idea
22 November, 2011Discovery Channel Magazine, November 2011
Lake Vostok is one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world: about the area of Lake Ontario, and much deeper. But you’ve never seen it. Neither has any other human being. That’s because it’s almost four kilometres under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, kept liquid by the pressure of the ice above it. And it’s been in complete isolation from the rest of the world for millions of years – since before the evolution of mankind.
But we are probably just weeks away from penetrating this lake for the first time. In November a team of Russian scientists and engineers will return to Antarctica to take the last step in a decades-long effort to drill to the lake. They are just metres away already. And when they break through, the secrets of the most pristine and remote wilderness on earth will be revealed – a discovery that many in the scientific community wish could be left unmade.
Vostok is so remote we only became certain of its existence after analysing satellite data in the 1990s, following curious British radar soundings 20 years earlier. It so happened that it was directly underneath Vostok Station, a facility the Russians had set up in the 1950s.
The Russians, without knowing there was a lake there, had been conducting deep drilling for ice cores since 1970, and continued towards the lake before stopping in 1999 amid concerns about contaminating the lake. Progress would be halted for eight years of debate with the international community, but drilling resumed in 2005 and last February reached 3,720 metres – probably about 50 metres from the surface. Then, tantalisingly close, they had to fly out on February 6 to get the last plane out before the winter set in.
So what do we know about Vostok? “We know this is the largest sub-glacial lake in the world,” says Valery Lukin, head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition. “We know the character of its coastline, the thickness of the ice sheet, the thickness of the water and the sedimentary rocks.” He says the lake has been untouched by any external force for “many millions of years. I believe the lake was formed before the glaciation epoch in the Antarctic – and that took place 35 million years ago.”
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