Drilling On Buried Lake Vostok Continues Non-Stop In Antarctica - Novosti

[hatrack]

ST. PETERSBURG, January 13 (RIA Novosti, Anna Novak) - Drilling work at a unique subglacial lake, Antarctica's Lake Vostok, is continuing around the clock, a spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctica scientific research institute said Friday.

Sergei Balyasnikov said that 1.5 meters of new glacier core have already been extracted and the main aim is to extract 50 more meters of the core before work is suspended on January 25.

The majority of the core will be left in Antarctica, with the remaining samples sent to Russian scientific laboratories and to a laboratory in France.

Scientists plan to resume drilling work during the Antarctic summer in 2006-2007 and to reach the lake itself in 2007-2008. The research work at Lake Vostok is being conducted under a Federal program named The World Ocean, involving scientists and specialists from nine Russian science and research institutes.

EDIT

http://en.rian.ru/world/20060113/42995952.html

[PATRICK]

1. And when the retreating ice

Uncovers the pristine continent? WHO had the rights to all the minerals? WHAT is the treaty that Bush will respect? And does the world class dinosaurs of the oil industry already have plans after an interregnum of tyranny, war, death and climate change?

Or, at the other "extreme", do we listen to Bill Nye the science guy musing what the drilling might mean for the penguins?

[shraby]

2. The drilling they are doing right now is to get

a sample of the lake. It has been buried under ice/snow for millenia and they want to see what organisms are in it.

[ret5hd]

3. are they taking any steps to prevent contamination...

of the lake by organisms brought there from the drilling process itself?

[shraby]

7. Yes they are. The lake was discovered with

satellite photos several years ago. They started to drill, but decided to stop and hold off until the questions about contamination could be addressed. If they've started drilling once again, they must have worked out the problems. They want pristine samples from the lake to see what organisms were there when the lake became frozen and hidden because of the ice. Also there is a question if any organisms have survived the extreme cold for that period of time.

[Odin2005]

6. The Antarctic ice sheet is in no danger.

Global warming isn't going to make things get THAT warm. ;)

The worst that could happen is a portion of the West Antarctic sheet, which is much smaller than the eastern sheet that holds the vast majority of the ice, sliding off into the ocean.

[kenny blankenship]

4. Drilling at vostok is not for oil

Vostok Station is the coldest place on earth. From the glacier it sits on, cores of ice have been drilled which are one of the primary sources of evidence for research into paleoclimatology, and hence also research on global warming.
Vostok Lake is directly below--thousands of meters down under the ice. Interest in the lake has to do more with microbes than anything to do with oil. Vostock ice has preserved unusual microbes and it's believed that there is an isolated ecological community in the lake which has been cut off from the rest of the world for many geological ages. It's hard to believe the lake isn't frozen with temperatures above it reaching down to -128F but the Russians halted their drilling effort until they had invented (so they claimed) drilling equipment which can reach the lake without introducing microbes from the world above.

[PATRICK]

5. And vice versa?

That is a lot of work then. My post was actually unrelated to anything the Russians were currently up to.