Millions-yr-old secrets: Lake Vostok drilling

RT - 

Truly mind-blowing for modern science, the 20-million-year-old Antarctic lake drilling is a life-or-death trial for explorers believes RT’s correspondent Sean Thomas, who covered some research on the icy continent.

Living at a Russian station in Antarctica, everyone was aware of the work going on at Vostok and were all very interested in the daily progress.

Each morning there is a radio call in which each of the research stations make contact with each other and give updates as to the news from their respective stations.

I can say that everyone at Bellingshausen on the Antarctic Peninsula could probably tell you down to the meter what the daily progress of the drilling was at the Vostok Station in the center of the continent.

After all, the work at Lake Vostok was a Russian project, at a Russian base with Russian scientists, so there is a lot of pride in the work that is being done there.

Life is truly extreme. When you step out onto the frozen rock and ice that make up the landscape, you realize that you are on the last true frontier that we have as a global society.

The work is innovative and important, and the people who are doing the research so far removed from civilization deserve a great deal of respect. Within this completely unique environment,

Vostok is the most extreme, as is the work they are doing there. For me, the possibility of finding new life on Earth, this far into the technological age, is incredibly exciting.

It is easy to become cynical in a world where everything seems to have already been discovered, but here we are ready to find something previously unimaginable and that is just fun !

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