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Earth Science

Scientists Drill Into 3,500 Feet of Ice To Reach a Mysterious Antarctic Lake (gizmodo.com) 88

Posted by msmash from the marching-forward dept.
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."
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Scientists Drill Into 3,500 Feet of Ice To Reach a Mysterious Antarctic Lake More

Scientists Drill Into 3,500 Feet of Ice To Reach a Mysterious Antarctic Lake

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  • System upgrade (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Maybe it's time for slashdot to start using the metric system...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

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

      • After four days of troubleshooting components that sustained wear and tear from sitting through two winters on ice, the Drill Team began drilling the main borehole on the evening of December 23rd and reached the lake faster than expected at 10:30pm on December 26th with a borehole depth of 1084 meters.

        https://salsa-antarctica.org/2018/12/28/3578/ [salsa-antarctica.org]

        Why would scientists want to "round up" numbers? They dug to a depth of 1084 metres and that's all there is to it.

        Saying "3500 feet" is the mistake here, because th

      • From the article's source:

        the Drill Team began drilling the main borehole on the evening of December 23rd and reached the lake faster than expected at 10:30pm on December 26th with a borehole depth of 1084 meters.

        Scientists and international projects tend to use SI units. Both the international foot [wikipedia.org] and US foot [wikipedia.org] are used in the US depending on state and task, but they're both defined in meters. So like you and the article demonstrated, you lose accuracy by sloppily converting it back and forth.

        • Headline should be ' violated and contaminated' (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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.

      • Re:System upgrade (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Gabest ( 852807 ) on Monday December 31, 2018 @11:48AM (#57884334)
        Could be it was 1 km, but they rounded it up to be 3500 feet.

  • Drill Into 3,500 Feet of Ice (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does that hurt? Nah, they're frozen.

  • Precautions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PuddleBoy ( 544111 ) on Monday December 31, 2018 @11:27AM (#57884212)

    "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.)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, but even that is going to cause contamination. From what I recall on the prior lake they did this to, the water down there had a different isotopic mix from current surface water. And they will be changing that at least a bit by pumping in cleaned surface water.

      • 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...

        • The flat-earth lobby has opposed these Antarctic lake boring projects for years, because in their eyes human curiosity is akin to how we view genocide. Actual genocide is something they favor, because "Team Rainbow 6" considers humanity to be an infection that should be killed off to preserve the sacredness of Nature (which they don't consider us to be a part of).

        • I don't know man, have you seen the movie "Life"? It doesn't take much more than a single organism to murder a whole lot of scientists and take over a planet.

          • I don't know man, have you seen the movie "Life"?

            Those Hollyweird kooks - making a movie about breakfast cereal.

            It would have been better if they made "Captain Crunch, the Early Years".

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by meglon ( 1001833 )
            Yeh, but this is in the Antarctic not space. As long as we can bring back Kurt Russell for the second sequel, we'll be ok.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Xest ( 935314 )

          That's not how it works, it only takes one single bacterium from outside the lake, to make it into the lake, and start multiplying over a period of time that just happens to be capable of killing off the primitive life in the lake to prevent us ever really discovering what was down there.

          This isn't a dilution thing where the danger is the risk of some small amount of chemical entering the lake that's diluted so much that it doesn't matter, life can replicate, grow, and spread, and if something gets in that

          • That's not how it works, it only takes one single bacterium from outside the lake

            The water is sterilized. That is not the issue under discussion. What I responded to was:

            the water down there had a different isotopic mix from current surface water.

            The issue was potentially affecting THAT, which you can plainly see the lake has way too large a volume to be affected in any meaningful way.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Xest ( 935314 )

              Ah, apologies, thwarted by Slashdot's shitty threading system where the AC post in the middle was hidden :)

  • First one was Lake Vostok (Score:5, Informative)

    by mapkinase ( 958129 ) on Monday December 31, 2018 @11:33AM (#57884252) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • I've heard this before (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday December 31, 2018 @11:41AM (#57884300)

    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.

    • Well my immediate thought was not so much killer sharks as it was another movie. Remember this one, they find something under the ice in Antarctica, a bunch of scientists go there to check it out and start drilling. A day later it's magically finished despite them not doing the drilling. Then aliens and predators have a fight and all the scientists die.

    • And then a shark flies in from behind and is about to eat her when the screen cuts to black.
      That is because the other shark, or was it a reptile ... got the camera man.

      I wonder how they managed to get it into the cinema, though ... perhaps via a cloud?

  • Ahh yes (Score:3)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Monday December 31, 2018 @12:09PM (#57884436)
    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.

  • must be a surfer in the mix (Score:3)

    by jm007 ( 746228 ) on Monday December 31, 2018 @12:36PM (#57884554)
    "...scientists are stoked..."

    bitchin' bro!! check out this sample

    gnarly!!!
  • Pure Antarctic Mercer Lake water from the dawn of time. Hand selected for your quaffication pleasure. Now in handy non-recyclable plastic bottles with luxurious seal skin covers made from the pelts of the rare Iliamna Lake freshwater seal. Be the first in your privilege context to possess and sample this rare delicacy. Only one bottle will be sold in each zip code, guaranteeing exclusivity to those discerning few who know water when they see it.

  • I can't wait to see Antarctica's counter attack.

    I guess it's interesting to possibly find something out from this ancient lake. And I realize this is different science. But it seems odd to be talking about global warming and ice melting, then we go drill deep into Antarctica with a hot water drill. I understand it's barely anything. It still just kind of makes me go: "Huh," for a second when I read it.

    I'd hope we could find something interesting. But from another comment on here, it sounds like we foun

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