Silence shrouds Antarctic dig w Russian scientists

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www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ominous-silence-shrouds-icy-dig/story-fn6e1m7z-1226262836589

Silence shrouds Antarctic dig

NewsCore
February 05, 2012 1:16AM





Hole Punch Clouds

Icy mission: Russian scientists are racing against oncoming winter to explore an Antarctic lake that has been hidden beneath the ice for millions of years. Picture: AP Source: AP

A TEAM of Russian scientists has gone quiet as they race against winter to uncover an ancient Antarctic lake.

The group from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) have been drilling for weeks in an effort to reach isolated Lake Vostok, a vast, dark body of water hidden 4000m below the surface of the continent. Lake Vostok has not been exposed to air in more than 20 million years.

The team's last contact with colleagues in the outside world was six days ago, and scientists from around the globe are unsure of the fate of the mission - and the scientists themselves - as Antarctica's deadly winter draws near.

"When you're outside, it's extremely cold - minus 30, minus 40," microbiologist Dr David A Pearce said. "If you left your eyes open the fluid in them would start to freeze. Your nostrils would start to freeze. The moisture in your mouth would start to freeze."
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Dr Pearce heads a team from the British Antarctic Survey on a competing mission, set to plumb the depths of Lake Ellsworth, one of a string of more than 370 lakes beneath Antarctica that may soon see light for the first time for eons. But time is running out for the Russian scientists.

"They need to be out by the sixth of February," Dr Pearce said, when winter sets in and temperatures drop another 40 degrees Centigrade. Vostok Station boasts the lowest recorded temperature on Earth, -89.4C.

The Russian scientists have been communicating with Dr Pearce and colleagues at a third Antarctic expedition - a study of the subglacial Whillans Ice Stream mainly featuring US scientists.

The competing teams have been watching the Russians and sharing notes over the past few days, Dr Pearce said, yet no one knows what has happened.

"We're all waiting with bated breath," he said.

Antarctic scientists carry Iridium satellite phones for communication, he said, but there are spots without coverage. The scientists may have encountered a technical issue, he speculated, or perhaps they have simply packed up and are traveling home - keeping their discoveries to themselves.

"I don't think there's anything sinister or ominous," Dr Pearce said.

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www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/fears-for-antarctic-alien-lake-scientists/story-e6freuy9-1226262454392

Fears for Antarctic 'alien' lake scientists

Daily Mail
February 04, 2012 9:25AM

antarctic link




Snow bridge: Dr Tony Fleming's grandfather overwintered in Antartica for seven months

A TEAM of Russian scientists has mysteriously lost contact with colleagues in the U.S. as they drill into a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice for 20 million years.

The scientists had been battling conditions of minus 66C at Lake Vostok, as they raced to drill into a lake buried two miles beneath the ice before the weather closed in. The scientists hope the lake's untouched water will reveal more about life on our planet 20 million years ago.

The lake, in the most inhospitable region of the planet, is kept liquid by geothermal heat under the ice and its conditions are often described as 'alien' because they are thought to be akin to the subterranean lakes on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Their radio silence has conjured chilling echoes of classic horror film The Thing, where scientists dig up a buried spacecraft in the Antarctic ice, only to unleash an extraterrestrial horror within.
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Valery Lukin, chief of the Russian Antactic Expedition, said last month: 'We do not know what is waiting for us down there.'

The water inside the lake will have had no contact with man-made pollutants or Earthly life forms for millions of years.

Last year the scientists working in freezing temperatures at Lake Vostok came within ten to 50 metres of the surface of the 'relic lake'.

But with the summer almost over, the team will have to leave the remote site within days - before it gets too cold for a plane to land.

Robin E. Bell, a researcher at Columbia University who has visited the region, told MailOnline that the team is focused on getting their job done while they still can, and it's premature to fear the worst.

She said: 'I wouldn’t read too much into it. When you’re doing something very challenging, the last thing you want to do is chat to people'.

Ms Bell added that the Lake Vostok expedition is very important to the Russians and that Mr Lukin's team are 'the best people to drill in the world'.

During drilling temperatures have sunk to minus 66C, and the lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was found at Vostok Station.

On July 21, 1983, temperatures hit minus 89.2C.

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www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/06/russian-scientists-reach-buried-antarctic-lake-vostok/

Russian scientists reach buried Antarctic Lake Vostok

Published February 06, 2012

| FoxNews.com




glacier Antarctica NSF

Peter Doran/National Science Foundation

Sunlight plays off the Canada Glacier in the Wrigth Valley, one of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

A group of Russian scientists in Antarctica has succeeded in drilling to a lake buried two miles beneath the icy landmass, the state-run Russian news service Ria Novosti reported -- following a week of radio silence from the team that had some scratching their heads.

“Yesterday, our scientists stopped drilling at the depth of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake,” the source reportedly said in a story posted Monday, Feb. 6.



An unnamed source with Russia's Federal Service for Hydrometeorology confirmed the news as well, Russian business newspaper The View reported.

John Priscu, a microbiologist with Montana State University who has worked on a similar Antarctic exploration program, hopes Vostok and other subglacial lakes buried beneath the continent may offer a glimpse of extreme new forms of life.

"If they were successful, their efforts will transform the way we do science in Antarctica and provide us with an entirely new view of what exists under the vast Antarctic ice sheet," he told FoxNews.com.

The team from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) had been drilling for weeks in an effort to reach isolated Lake Vostok, a vast, dark body of water hidden 13,000 ft. below the ice sheet's surface. The lake hasn't been exposed to air in more than 20 million years.

Russia has not yet officially confirmed the breakthrough.

Beyond the fantastic science, Ria Novosti noted a number of rumors about the lake, including one that talks of a secret Nazi sub base, and the bodies of Hitler and his mistress being delivered there for cloning -- fantastic stories that again are surfacing in the Russian press.

A brief break in communication with colleagues in the unfrozen world had some asking questions about the scientists, as Antarctica’s killing winter draws near. But despite the lack of info and onset of winter, which brings temperatures as low as -80 F or colder, the team was never in danger, Priscu said.

"They are very capable scientists and drillers and the thought never entered my mind that they are in any kind of danger," he told FoxNews.com.

The buried lake may be similar to the conditions on Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa, Ria Novosti said.

The Lake Vostok project has been years in the making, with initial drilling at the massive lake -- 6,060 square miles (15,690 square kilometers) -- starting in 1998. The scientists were quickly able to reach 11,800 feet (3,600 meters), but had to stop due to concerns of possible contamination of the never-before-touched lake water.

The scientists came up with a clever way to make sure the water would not be contaminated: They agreed to drill until a sensor warned them of free water. At that point they took out the kerosene and adjusted the pressure so that none of the liquids would fall into the lake, but rather lake water would rise through the hole due to pressure from below.

The Russians are not alone in such a mission: Scientists from around the world are literally racing to explore the mysteries of Antarctica. There are two other Antarctic digs underway.

A team from the British Antarctic Survey is on a competing mission, set to plumb the depths of Lake Ellsworth, one of a string of more than 370 lakes beneath Antarctica that may soon see light for the first time. And a third Antarctic expedition -- a study of the subglacial Whillans Ice Stream -- mainly features U.S. scientists.

Read more: www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/06/russian-scientists-reach-buried-antarctic-lake-vostok/#ixzz1liP08OZW

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www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0208/Ancient-Antarctic-lake-thought-to-harbor-prehistoric-life-Hitler-clones

Ancient Antarctic lake thought to harbor prehistoric life, Hitler clones

In its reporting on the efforts of a Russian drilling team to reach a subglacial lake in Antarctica, Russian state media has revived an old conjecture about a secret Nazi cloning facility on the southern continent.

By Eoin O'Carroll, Staff / February 8, 2012

Russian researchers from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of St. Petersburg pose for a photo Monday at the Vostok station in Antarctica. Russian state media says that the team has successfully drilled through two miles of ice to reach a massive subglacial lake that has been locked beneath the ice for millions of years.

Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute Press Service/AP
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After a decade of effort, Russian researchers in Antarctica have successfully drilled through more than two miles of solid ice to reach a massive lake that has been sealed off from light and air for millions of years.

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If Lake Vostok, a freshwater body roughly the size of Lake Ontario that has been locked beneath the ice for between 15 million and 34 million years, is found to harbor living organisms, the discovery would fuel hopes of discovering life on other worlds, such as Jupiter's moon, Europa, or Saturn's moon, Enceladus, both of which are thought to have liquid oceans below their icy crusts.

The first announcement of the team's success was reported Monday in RIA Novosti. The Russian state-owned news agency quoted an unnamed "scientific source," who said, “Yesterday, our scientists stopped drilling at the depth of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake.”

A few paragraphs later, the story takes an unexpected turn:

With the current events happening at Lake Vostok, an old theory saying that German Nazis may have built a secret base there as early as the 1930s, has resurfaced.

It is thought that towards the end of the Second World War, the Nazis moved to the South Pole and started constructing a base at Lake Vostok. In 1943, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was quoted saying “Germany's submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Fuehrer on the other end of the world,” in Antarctica.

According to German naval archives, months after Germany surrendered to the Allies in April, 1945, the German submarine U-530 arrived at the South Pole from the Port of Kiel. Crewmembers constructed an ice cave and supposedly stored several boxes of relics from the Third Reich, including Hitler’s secret files.

It is also rumored that later the submarine U-977 delivered the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun to Antarctica for DNA cloning purposes.

While some might find it odd that the very first official announcement of a major scientific breakthrough contains references to esoteric Nazi conspiracy theories, there is a kernel of truth in there – albeit a tiny one. In December 1938, a German expedition set off for Antarctica with the aim of establishing a whaling station and possibly a naval base. The expedition arrived in early 1939 and set about planting Nazi flags on land that had recently been claimed by Norway. The expedition named this region "Neuschwabenland," and apparently left without building any permanent structures.

That's all we really know about Nazis in Antarctica. The area that the German expedition claimed is on Antarctica's northern coast, hundreds of miles from the landlocked Lake Vostok. That a U-boat reached the South Pole seems doubtful, as the crew would have had to have gotten out and pushed their vessel overland. Of course it could be that the submariners had reached the magnetic South Pole, which is constantly shifting due to changes in the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic South Pole is currently off the coast of Antarctica, south of Australia, but in 1939s it would have been several miles inland.

The rumor that a U-boat secretly ferried Hitler and his wife out of Germany is an old one. A Time Magazine story from Monday, July 23, 1945, relays the story of U-530, which surrendered to authorities in Mar del Plata, Argentina, some two months after Germany's surrender. The story notes that an Argentine reporter cited a police report describing a submarine surfacing off Argentina's coast and dropping off two passengers, "a high-ranking officer and a civilian." The Time reporter speculated that the couple "might have been Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, in man's dress."

There's no evidence that U-530 ever visited Antarctica, although neither the skipper nor his crew never explained exactly what they had been doing for the previous two months.

Submarine U-977 also surrendered in Mar del Plata on August 17, 1945, after famously spending 66 days submerged as it travelled from the North Atlantic to Argentina. The voyage of U-977 has fueled a several conspiracy theories involving Hitler and Nazi gold, but no real evidence.

In any case, it's highly unlikely that Nazi scientists would have even thought to attempt to preserve the Führer's DNA. The DNA molecule was first discovered in 1869, but it wasn't until 1952 that scientist confirmed that it plays a role in heredity. The first successful clone from an adult mammal didn't come until 1996, when Scottish scientists successfully cloned a sheep