It has lain, silent and unseen, buried under miles of ice for 20 million years. Now, after more than two decades of
drilling, Russian scientists have reached the pristine surface of a gigantic freshwater lake – Lake Vostok in Antarctica – and what they find there could change everything.

The vast depths of Lake Vostok could hold life from the distant past, or clues to the search for life on other planets. Scientists have described reaching the lake as “a meeting with the unknown”.

“In the simplest sense, it can transform the way we think about life,” Nasa’s chief scientist Waleed Abdalati told The Associated Press by email.

As such, researchers have been wildly anticipating the break-through for years.

There are hopes it will allow a glimpse into microbial life forms that existed before the Ice Age, or precious evidence of what conditions must be like on the ice-crust moons of Jupiter and Saturn, or under Mars’ polar ice caps – and whether life could survive there.

Valery Lukin, the head of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in charge of the mission, said Wednesday that his team reached the lake’s surface Sunday.

“There is no other place on Earth that has been in isolation for more than 20 million years,” Lev Savatyugin, a researcher with the AARI who was involved in preparing the mission, told The Associated Press.

“It’s a meeting with the unknown.”

Savatyugin said that scientists hope to find primeval bacteria that could expand the human knowledge of the origins of life.

“We need to see what we have here before we send missions to ice-crust moons, like Jupiter’s moon Europa,” he said.

The project, however, has drawn strong fears that 60 metric tons (66 tons) of lubricants and antifreeze used in the drilling may contaminate the pristine lake, which is roughly the size of Lake Ontario in Canada.

The Russian researchers have insisted that the bore would only slightly touch the lake’s surface and a surge in pressure will send the water rushing up the shaft where it will freeze, immediately sealing out the toxic chemicals.

Lukin said in a statement that about 1.5 cubic metres of kerosene and freon poured into tanks on the surface from the boreshaft, proof that the lake water streamed from beneath, froze, and blocked the hole.

The scientists will later remove the frozen sample for analysis in December when the next Antarctic summer comes.

Lake Vostok, about 3.8 kilometres (2.4 miles) beneath the surface, is the largest in a web of nearly 400 known subglacial lakes in Antarctica.

Scientists in other nations hope to follow up with similar projects.

Researchers believe that microbial life may exist in the dark depths of the lake despite high pressure and constant cold – conditions similar to those expected to be found under ice crust on Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s move Enceladus.

Source – Telegraph UK