Scientists race to breach Antarctica's lake Vostok

Red Orbit -

Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years.

Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.

With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out on February 6. “It's minus 40 (Celsius/Fahrenheit) outside,” said Turkeyev. “But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon.”

Scientists are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved in the times before the ice age. The lake could also offer scientists a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extremes on Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“It's like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don't know what we'll find,” Valery Lukin of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the expedition, told Reuters.

The discovery of the hidden network of sub-glacial lakes of Antarctica in the 1990s has sparked much enthusiasm among scientists the world over.

Explorers from the US and Britain are following the trail of Russia’s scientists with their own missions to probe other buried lakes, which are among the last of the world’s hidden and unexplored areas.

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