Antarctic Lake Cleared for Study

May 18, 2007 — One of the most mysterious, fragile and increasingly important ecosystems on Earth may finally be visited by scientists, thanks to a new National Academies of Science (NAS) report.

Scientists from several countries including the United States have long desired to drill through the thick ice and into Antarctica's 100-mile-long Lake Vostok and find out the secrets of what might live there in the most isolated ecosystem on the planet.

But recent discoveries suggest it could also reveal clues to how sea levels might change with global warming and even serve as a dry run for someday drilling into the ice-covered seas of Jupiter's moon Europa.

The trouble is that drilling through the ice into Vostok and more than 140 smaller subglacial lakes is no easy task — it carries the risk of contaminating or otherwise damaging pristine environments. So exactly how to responsibly study the lakes has been a matter of controversy among scientists.

"No lake has been penetrated yet," said Mahlon "Chuck" Kennicutt at Texas A&M University, one of the top U.S. scientists working on the matter. The reason is that scientists wanted to be certain they had independent review and approval for such delicate work by the broader scientific community, he said.

That approval came in the form of the just-released NAS report, entitled "Exploration of Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments: Environmental and Scientific Stewardship."

"I think this will open the door to proposing drilling into sub-ice environments," Kennicutt told Discovery News.

The report comes not a moment too soon. In the past couple of years there has been a sea change in how scientists think about Vostok and its sub-glacial brethren.

Recent studies on changing elevations of the surface ice in and around the lakes have revealed that Vostok is not as isolated as once thought. Instead, it and the other lakes are tied to an enormous network of subglacial waterways that can push the surface ice up and down. That action may have created huge outbursts of water in coastal areas in the not-too-distant past.

And since Antarctica holds the world's largest reserve of fresh water, knowing more about the workings of that subglacial hydrological system is critical for understanding how it might respond to global warming.

"Suddenly the lakes are important on a much larger scale," said Robin Bell, a subglacial lake researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York. "Used to be (Vostok) was just a novelty. Over the last decade it's become important for our planet."

Russian researchers are moving ahead with plans to penetrate Lake Vostok, said Kennicutt, and a team of scientists from the U.K. is getting closer to doing so at Lake Ellsworth.

"Other countries are doing their own things," said Kennicutt. "We hope (the NAS report) will set a standard."