Russian Team Breaching Lake Vostok This Week

[Blue]

aaaannd......

immediate take-back

it's like the curiosity take-back all over again...

Russian scientists on Saturday dismissed initial reports that they had found a wholly new type of bacteria in a mysterious subglacial lake in Antarctica.

Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics had said Thursday that samples obtained from the underground Lake Vostok in May 2012 contained a bacteria bearing no resemblance to existing types.

But the head of the genetics laboratory at the same institute said on Saturday that the strange life forms were in fact nothing but contaminants.

“We found certain specimen, although not many. All of them were contaminants” that were brought there by the lab during research, Vladimir Korolyov told the Interfax news agency.

“That is why we cannot say that previously-unknown life was found,” he said.

Lake Vostok is the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica and scientists have long wanted to study its eco-system. The Russian team last year drilled almost four kilometres (2.34 miles) to reach the lake and take the samples.

Russia had been hoping to discover a new life form at the pristine site and the drilling was of major importance for the prestige to the country’s science programme.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin was even given a sample of Lake Vostok water after the drilling was performed.

Aw crap. But hey maybe they'll find something up north...

Ships Could Sail Right Over North Pole by 2050

(sorry it's NBC by way of TWC)

Shipping routes across the Arctic Ocean – which have been ice-covered and impassable since humans invented ships millenniums ago – could be open to ships for the first time by midcentury, thanks to climate change, a new study suggests.

This includes shipping directly across the North Pole and through the famed Northwest Passage, a sea route from Newfoundland toward the Bering Strait, neither of which has ever been done. The study appears in Monday's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Plus.

"Nobody's ever talked about shipping over the top of the North Pole," according to study lead author Laurence Smith, a geography professor at UCLA. "This is an entirely unexpected possibility."

The earliest that sea routes would be taken directly over the North Pole and through the famed Northwest Passage would likely be in the 2040s or 2050s, Smith says. This sort of shipping would also occur only in late summer and early autumn, he adds: The prime month would be September, when Arctic sea ice is at its annual minimum.

"The development is both exciting from an economic development point of view and worrisome in terms of safety, both for the Arctic environment and for the ships themselves," Smith says.

Going directly across the Arctic, or through the Northwest Passage, could lead to significant savings in time and money for shippers. For instance, Smith estimates that traveling from Rotterdam to the Bering Strait via the Northern Sea Route would take almost 19 days, while traveling across the North Pole could be done in 14.6 days.

In the past couple of summers, a few dozen ships have traversed the Arctic through the Northern Sea Route, which is controlled by Russia, who "charge a lot of money" to use it.

No part of the world has seen as much dramatic warming in recent decades as has the Arctic. Since the 1980s, average temperatures in the Arctic have risen faster than the global average. Also, sea ice extent in September 2012 reached the lowest ever observed in the satellite record (1979-present), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual Arctic Report Card.

Most of the Arctic Ocean currently is controlled by five countries – the USA, Canada, Russian, Denmark and Norway – all of whom have a coastline on the ocean. The center of it, however, which includes the North Pole, is considered to be in international waters.

Given this potential for new shipping routes in the Arctic, NOAA recently issued a plan for updated Arctic maps as part of a major effort to improve navigation for Arctic areas experiencing increasing vessel traffic as ice disappears.

"Ships need updated charts with precise and accurate measurements," said Capt. Doug Baird, chief of NOAA's Coast Survey's marine chart division. "We don't have decades to get it done. Ice diminishment is here now."

[Ben D]

Mysteries of Lake Vostok: Biologists find over 3,500 life forms in isolated Antarctic reservoir

RT July 07, 2013 02:39



Scientists have discovered more than 3,500 unique gene sequences in Lake Vostok – the underground Antarctic water basin isolated from the outside world for 15 million years – revealing a complex ecosystem far beyond anything they could have expected.

"The bounds on what is habitable and what is not are changing," said Scott Rogers, Bowling Green State University professor of biological sciences, who led a genetic study of the contents of half a liter of water brought back from the lake after it was drilled by Russian scientists last year.

"We found much more complexity than anyone thought," Rogers said. "It really shows the tenacity of life, and how organisms can survive in places where a couple dozen years ago we thought nothing could survive."

There are few places on Earth more hostile to life forms than Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake in the Antarctic, and initially Rogers believed that the water from it may have been completely sterile.

Water is located 4,000 meters below the ice, which completely blocks sunlight, and creates huge pressure on the liquid. It is also literally located in the coldest place on Earth: the world’s lowest temperature of -89.2C was recorded at Vostok Station above the reservoir.



But after using bleach to remove outer layers of the ice (the form in which the water was extracted from the lake) which could potentially have been contaminated during the drilling, and conducting RNA and DNA testing, thousands of microscopic life forms, predominantly bacteria, were detected.

Many had expected that if any life forms were to be found in the frozen crypt, they would be uniquely adapted to the harsh environment, and perhaps entirely different as a result of being shielded from evolution of life elsewhere on the planet for millions of years.

Rogers, who has just published his findings in PLOS One magazine, says this has not turned out to be the case.

"Many of the species we sequenced are what we would expect to find in a lake. Most of the organisms appear to be aquatic (freshwater), and many are species that usually live in ocean or lake sediments."



Rogers’ team believes the relative ordinariness of the organisms discovered may be due to the fact that they are left there as a legacy of when Antarctica had a temperate climate 35 million years ago, rather than as a result of evolution inside the lake.

Some of the organisms found in Lake Vostok commonly exist in ocean environments (in the digestive systems of fish and crustaceans) suggesting that the reservoir was once connected to a bigger body of saltwater.

But Rogers believes “two huge drops of temperature” cut it off and conserved it in its present state.

Yet the study is not excluding the possibility of startling discoveries.

"It's a very challenging project and the more you study, the more you want to know. Every day you are discovering something new and that leads to more questions to be answered,” said Yury Shtarkman, who conducted many of the analyses, and believes it could take a lifetime to untangle the secrets of the lake.

[Luther Blissett]

…The researchers were able to identify thousands of bacteria, including some that are typically found in the digestive systems of fish, crustaceans and annelid worms — suggesting (but not proving) that there may be fish and other complex organisms swimming in the lake! Specifically, the sequences hinted at various types of fungi, arthropods, springtails, water fleas, and mollusks. Again, the researchers aren't saying that these organisms exist in the lake — there could be many other explanations for the presence of these bacteria — but this new evidence certainly makes Lake Vostok all the more fascinating and ripe for future research.…

http://io9.com/new-evidence-antarctica- ... -706010511

[tazmic]

But so far they have only analysed some ice which they melted. How old is the ice compared to the water? What's the relationship supposed to be?

If this place has really been cut off from the rest of the world for 35 million years, would it be considered odd if the life trapped there from back then showed no evidence of further evolution? Or is 35 mill just an evolutionary shrug?

Would not finding any biological novelty force them to conclude that the lake obviously isn't as cut off as presumed? Or that the environmental novelty was simply retarding rather than genetically inspiring?

[seemslikeadream]

Confirmed: Microbial life found half mile below Antarctic ice sheet
Microbial cell
Scientists present definitive proof that life exists .5 miles beneath the ice sheet in the Antarctic lake. Pictured here, a coccoid shaped microbial cell with an attached sediment particle from the Subglacial Lake Whillans water column. (Trista Vick-Majors)
By DEBORAH NETBURN contact the reporter Scientific ResearchAntarctica

Scientists find 4,000 species of microbes thriving half a mile beneath the Antarctic ice sheet
Microbes live on ice and rock in the cold dark of a buried Antarctic lake
In an icy lake half a mile beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, scientists have discovered a diverse ecosystem of single-celled organisms that have managed to survive without ever seeing the light of the sun.

The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature is not so much a surprise as a triumph of science and engineering. The research team spent 10 years and more than $10 million to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that life did indeed exist in subglacial lakes near the South Pole.

I wasn't surprised to find life under there, but I was surprised how much life there was, and how they made a living. They are essentially eating the Earth.
- John Priscu, lead scientist
"It's the real deal," said Peter Doran, an Earth scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved in the study. "There was news that they found life early this year, but a bunch of us were waiting for the peer reviewed paper to come out before we jumped for joy."

John Priscu, the lead scientist on the project, has been studying the Antarctic for 30 years. He published his first paper describing how life might exist in the extreme environment beneath the ice sheet in 1999, and has been looking for definitive proof ever since.

In the winter of 2013-2014, he finally got his chance. After spending millions on a drill that could bore a clean hole free of contaminants through the ice sheet, and moving more than 1 million pounds of gear on giant sleds across the Antarctic ice sheet, he and his team had just four frenzied days to collect the water samples that would prove whether his theories were right or wrong.

Before claiming victory, he wanted to see three lines of evidence that life did exist in the underwater lake. He wanted to visually see the cells under a microscope, he wanted to prove they were alive by feeding them organic matter and measuring their respiration rate, and he wanted to see how much ATT was in their cells.

"I wasn't surprised to find life under there, but I was surprised how much life there was, and how they made a living," said Priscu, who teaches at Montana State University. "They are essentially eating the Earth."

Priscu and his team report the discovery of close to 4,000 species of microbes growing in the cold, dark environment of Subglacial Lake Whillans in western Antarctica. Each quarter teaspoon of the tea-colored lake water that they brought to the surface had about 130,000 cells in it, they write.

The WISSARD camp sitting .5 a mile above the subglacial Lake Whillans in Antarctica. (J. Priscu / MSU)
"I think we were all surprised by that number," said Brent Christner of Louisiana State University and the lead author of the Nature paper. "We've got lakes here on campus that we can take samples of and the numbers are about in that range."

Life in the lakes of Louisiana has sunlight to provide it with energy, but in the lightless environment of Subglacial Lake Whillans, the microbes rely on minerals from the bedrock and sediments instead. The pressure of the slowly moving ice above the lake grinds the underlying rock into a powder, liberating the minerals in the rock into the water, and making them accessible to the microorganisms living there, explains Christener. The microbes act on those iron, ammonium and sulphide compounds to create energy.

"Ice, water and rock is all that is really needed to fuel the system," he said.

cComments
Wow, amazing. They can find life under a half-mile sheet of ice at the south pole on Earth but can't find life on Mars under ice of any thickness. The correct terminology is "where there is life there is water." Not "where there is water there is life."

The findings have major implications for the search for life outside of Earth, especially on the moons of Enceladus and Europa, where scientists believe a thick icy crust covers a vast, internal liquid ocean.

"Europa has an icy shelf and liquid water beneath it, just like we find in the Antarctic system which allows us to draw some conclusions about what we might find there," said Priscu. "I'd love to be around when we finally penetrate that environment to look for life."

Lake Whillans, the first lake to be sampled in Antarctica, is a shallow lake, about 6 feet deep, and about 37-square-miles in size. Priscu compares it to the lakes you might see in the Mississippi Basin, with rivers running through it and bringing some of the lake water out into the Indian Ocean.

To sample it, the researchers developed a new type of hot water drill system.

"In principal it is nothing more than a kilometer (about 1/2 a mile) garden hose that you shoot hot water through," said Christener, "but in reality it is a complex monster."

The tricky part was using the hot water to drill down into the ice without getting any of that water in the lake. "It's like taking an 800 page novel and drilling down into 799 pages and then stopping," he said.

The researchers brought about 13 gallons of the lake water back to the surface to study its chemistry and to see what might be living in it. The water was a brownish color because of the very fine particles that were suspended in it. The particles were so fine, that even after a few days, they did not settle to the bottom of the containers.


Going forward, the researchers want to learn more about how nutrients created by microbial activity in Lake Whillans affects the water in the Indian Ocean. They also think there may be large amounts of the greenhouse gas methane being produced in the lake that could be released into the atmosphere if the Antarctic ice sheet melts.

They would also like to look at other types of subglacial lakes on the continent, some of which are 3,000 feet deep and buried beneath 2 miles of ice.

"Now that we have shown that life can exist in this environment, we'd like to look at other lake types to see the biodiversity and ecosystems that exist under the ice, and get a better idea of their global importance," said Priscu, who was on his way to plan the next expedition.

The team is going back to Antarctica with their drill in November.

"Hopefully we'll have more discoveries coming soon," he said.

[Ben D]

Seems life can grow anywhere...how about on the outside of the international space Station?

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Has_sea_plankton_been_discovered_on_the_ISS_outer_hull_999.html

[stickdog99]

But so far they have only analysed some ice which they melted. How old is the ice compared to the water? What's the relationship supposed to be?

If this place has really been cut off from the rest of the world for 35 million years, would it be considered odd if the life trapped there from back then showed no evidence of further evolution?

It would be consistent with the idea that true evolutionary novelty requires genetic input from outer space.