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Vostok: The Lake of ShadowsCover Story FATE Magazine 2002-06-01 00:00:00 by Scott Corrales “Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left.” —H. P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness” The inspiration for this article began in the summer of 1996, when a series of email messages began to appear suggesting the possibility that “someone” or “something” was surreptitiously removing all recent maps of Antarctica. The notion was so outrageous that even die-hard conspiracy theorists found themselves having to clarify the...

Cold and Deep: Antarctica's Lake Vostok has two big neighbors Sid Perkins GREAT LAKES. Lake Vostok and the newly described 90°E and Sovetskaya Lakes lie beneath a kilometers-thick blanket of ice. The black square in the inset shows the outline of this satellite image on a map of Antarctica; the cross indicates the South Pole. R.E. Bell, et al. Trapped beneath Antarctica's kilometers-thick ice sheet are two bodies of water that rival North America's Great Lakes, new analyses suggest. The geological setting of these huge, unfrozen lakes hints that they may harbor ecosystems that have been isolated for millions of...

The penetration to relict water of subglacial Lake Vostok happened at last on 5 February at 20.25 Moscow time. On 4 February there was a contact of the drill with the water lens at the borehole depth of 3766 m. The ice core bottom segment extracted from this depth served as evidence – the surface of the lower 70 cm of the ice core was glazed, as if it were submerged to water just before recovery. No ducts or capillaries in the ice core body were visually observed at this. Exactly this contact with the water lens in the borehole...

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...

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 scientific community is holding its breath for a team of Russian scientists that has been out of contact with colleagues in the U.S for six days, as they drill into a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice for 20 million years. They have to evacuate their station by Tuesday - when winter proper kicks in and temperatures start to drop to an inhospitable minus 90C. The scientists are currently battling conditions of up to minus 66C at Lake Vostok as they raced to drill into a lake buried two miles beneath the ice before the weather closed in. They...

A group of Russian scientists plumbing the frozen Antarctic in search of a lake buried in ice for tens of millions of years have failed to respond to increasingly anxious U.S. colleagues -- and as the days creep by, the fate of the team remains unknown."No word from the ice for 5 days," Dr. John Priscu professor of Ecology at Montana State University, told FoxNews.com via email.

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometres below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it's been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It's also oligotropic, meaning that it's supersaturated with oxygen -- levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes. Since 1990, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersberg in Russia has been drilling...