No Alien Life Found In Lake Vostok

Russian specialists started drilling the ice in the area of Lake Vostok more than 30 years ago. The lake lies at the depth of 3,768 meters. On February 5^th, the Russian scientists finished the drilling and reached the surface of the subglacial lake, RIA Novosti news agency said. A source at the Russian Meteorological Agency confirmed that the scientists had reached the surface of the lake.  

Lake Vostok is the largest of Antarctica’s more than 140 sub-glacial lakes. Lake Vostok is located at the southern Pole of Cold, beneath Russia’s Vostok Station under the surface of the central East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is at 3,488 m (11,444 ft) above mean sea level. The surface of this fresh water lake is approximately 4,000 m (13,100 ft) under the surface of the ice, which places it at approximately 500 m (1,600 ft) below sea level. Measuring 250 km (160 mi) long by 50 km (30 mi) wide at its widest point, and covering an area of 15,690 km2 (6,060 sq mi) and an average depth of 344 m (1,129 ft). It has an estimated volume of 5,400 km3 (1,300 cu mi).[2] The lake is divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The liquid water over the ridge is about 200 m (700 ft), compared to roughly 400 m (1,300 ft) deep in the northern basin and 800 m (2,600 ft) deep in the southern.

The lake is named after Vostok Station, which in turn is named after the Vostok (Восток), a sloop-of-war, which mean “East” in Russian. The existence of a subglacial lake in the Vostok region was first suggested by Russian geographer Andrey Kapitsa based on seismic soundings made during the Soviet Antarctic Expeditions in 1959 and 1964 to measure the thickness of the ice sheet. The continued research by Russian and British scientists led by 1993 to the final confirmation of the existence of the lake by J.P. Ridley using ERS-1 laser altimetry.

The lake was drilled into by Russian scientists in 2012. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15  to 25 million years. On 5 February 2012, a team of Russian scientists claimed to have completed the longest ever ice core of 3,768 m (12,400 ft) and pierced the ice shield to the surface of the lake. Samples of the freshly frozen water in the ice well are expected to be collected at the end of 2012 when the new Antarctic summer starts. The Russian team plans to send a robot into the lake to collect water samples and sediments from the bottom. Unusual forms of life could be found in the lake’s liquid layer, an ecosystem sealed off below the ice for millions of years, conditions which could resemble those of the hypothesized ice-covered ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa

Posted by Brian Owens  on behalf of Naomi Lubick at Nature’s News Blog: “A first analysis of the ice that froze onto the drillbit used in last February’s landmark drilling to a pristine Antarctic lake shows no native microbes came up with the lake water, according to Sergey Bulat of Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (Russia). The very uppermost layer of Lake Vostok appears to be “lifeless” so far, says Bulat, but that doesn’t mean the rest of it is.”

Bulat reported what he calls his team’s “very preliminary results” on Tuesday, at the 12th European Workshop on Astrobiology (ENEA 2012), in Stockholm, Sweden, at the AlbaNova University Center.

“Bulat and his colleagues counted the microbes present in the ice sample and checked their genetic makeup to figure out the phylotypes. They counted fewer than 10 microbes/ml — about the same magnitude they would expect to find in the background in their clean room. And three of the four phylotypes they identified matched contaminants from the drilling oil, with the fourth unknown but also most likely from the lubricant,” according to the Nature News posting.  The Russain  team hopes to resume work in May 2013

Lake Vostok is a stand-in for icy bodies that might harbor life, like Jupiter’s moon Europa. According to Gerda Horneck of the German Aerospace Center (DLR)  any result from Lake Vostok is important for astrobiology, and the search for extremophiles that could give hints of what life could be like elsewhere.”  

The lake water is estimated to have been sealed off under the thick ice sheet about 15 million years ago. Initially, it was thought that the same water had made up the lake since the time of its formation, giving a residence time in the order of one million years. Later research by Robin Bell and Michael Studinger from the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University suggested that the water of the lake is continually freezing and being carried away by the motion of the Antarctic ice sheet, while being replaced by water melting from other parts of the ice sheet in these high pressure conditions. This resulted in an estimate that the entire volume of the lake is replaced every 13,300 years—its effective mean residence time.

The coldest temperature ever observed on Earth, −89 °C (−128 °F), was recorded at Vostok Station on 21 July 1983. The average water temperature is calculated to be around −3 °C (27 °F); it remains liquid below the normal freezing point because of high pressure from the weight of the ice above it. Geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior may warm the bottom of the lake. The ice sheet itself insulates the lake from cold temperatures on the surface.

Lake Vostok is an oligotrophic extreme environment, one that is expected to be supersaturated with nitrogen and oxygen, measuring 2.5 l (0.088 cu ft) of nitrogen and oxygen per 1 kg (2.2 lb) of water, that is 50 times higher than those typically found in ordinary freshwater lakes on Earth. The sheer weight and pressure around 345.60 bars (5,012.5 psi) of the continental ice cap on top of Lake Vostok is believed to contribute to the high gas concentration.

Besides dissolving in the water, oxygen and other gases are trapped in a type of structure called a clathrate. In clathrate structures, gases are enclosed in an icy cage and look like packed snow. These structures form at the high-pressure depths of Lake Vostok and would become unstable if brought to the surface.[

Lake Vostok is the largest of Antarctica's more than 140 sub-glacial lakes. Lake Vostok is located at the southern Pole of Cold, beneath Russia's Vostok Station under the surface of the central East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is at 3,488 m (11,444 ft) above mean sea level. The surface of this fresh water lake is approximately 4,000 m (13,100 ft) under the surface of the ice, which places it at approximately 500 m (1,600 ft) below sea level. Measuring 250 km (160 mi) long by 50 km (30 mi) wide at its widest point, and covering an area of 15,690 km2 (6,060 sq mi) and an average depth of 344 m (1,129 ft). It has an estimated volume of 5,400 km3 (1,300 cu mi).[2] The lake is divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The liquid water over the ridge is about 200 m (700 ft), compared to roughly 400 m (1,300 ft) deep in the northern basin and 800 m (2,600 ft) deep in the southern.

 The Discovery of Subglacial Lake Vostok

In the 1960s, Russian scientists hypothesized water beneath the ice sheet based on results from seismic soundings. In the 1970s, a joint US-UK-Denmark airborne radar mapping project discovered areas with flat reflections from the bottom of the ice sheet suggesting water beneath the ice. The full size of Lake Vostok was first revealed in 1996 by the flat ice sheet surface mapped from the European ERS-1 satellite (see picture on the upper left side or click here).

Microbial Life in Ice
Bacteria found in refrozen lake water at the bottom of the Vostok ice core could be part of an indigenous ecosystem below that’s been living in the cold, dark waters for millions of years. Lake Vostok has been isolated from open exchange with the atmosphere for several million years. No one knows how any organism, cut off from air, sunlight or any apparent source of life-sustaining energy, could survive in its frigid waters or under such crushing pressure of more than 360 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level.

Subglacial Lake Vostok is the closest terrestrial analogue to Europa, the ice covered Jovian moon, and to a Neoproterozoic snowball Earth. The 4-kilometer-thick ice sheet goes afloat as it crosses the lake, just as ice sheets become floating ice shelves at the grounding line. The subglacial environment represents one of the most oligotrophic environments on Earth, an environment with low nutrient levels and low standing stocks of viable organisms. If life thrives in these environments it may have to depend on alternative energy sources and survival strategies. A flash animation illustrates the basal freezing process and the flow of the ice sheet over the lake: (Flash animation of subglacial Lake Vostok).

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