Russians Nab First Sample of Lake Vostok
Posted on 01/12/2013 9:06:44 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Russian drilling operations at Lake Vostok, Antarctica, have succeeded in collecting a long-sought core sample of water frozen into the borehole from the glacier-covered, 20 million-year-old lake they cracked into last year...
In February last year the Russian drilling team cracked the ice over the surface of the lake using a melt drill for the final 40 feet. But no lake water was collected.
An elaborate publicity stunt on Feb. 10, 2012, in which Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ceremoniously received a sample of what was billed as water from Lake Vostok was later explained to be water from the point just before the final push near the surface of the lake.
Indeed no water from the lake was collected at the time. An analysis of the ice frozen on the drill bit before they switched to the melt drill showed, perhaps as expected, no signs of life. They did find elements of drilling oil and lubricants, however.
The water that gushed into the borehole through the crack in the ice, froze in place and remained untouched until now...
By using the lake water as a frozen plug in the borehole, the Russians have managed to tap into what is considered the largest of Antarctica’s known sub-glacial lakes, without, hopefully, contaminating it. Analysis of the ice will tell whether the ice is indeed contamination free and if any organisms from the surface of the lake found themselves frozen in history.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Russians Nab First Sample of Lake Vostok
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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As I’ve always suspected, the Earth is not flat and it isn’t round, it is what makes the most practical sense, a cube!
There was a wonderful calendar in the early ‘70s for navigators. Each month it asked ‘What if the Earth were...” and showed pictures of different shaped earths. It had a disc shaped, egg shaped, cylindrical shape, torus shaped, tetrahedral, cubic and even a hyperbolic paraboloidal (saddle) shaped earth!
That doesn't make any sense, they could have just crawled down the side of the cube.
Don’t be ridiculous they would have fallen off if they tried to crawl over the edge.
They could use a rope to crawl down.
Bartender, I’ll have a vodka with vostok water please.
What? Strung between two sparrows and held by the dorsal guiding feathers?
The real reason the Russians are drilling is that they believe a lake of pure vodka not water is trapped beneath the ice.
Millions of gallons of vodka....enough to last two people a lifetime!
I hope this is where it ends. Any drilling operation necessarily involves at least some substances that could contaminate the lake.
Apparently they’ve already managed to introduce some amount of drilling lube and such. The lake is under terrific pressure, had they really effed it up (pardon my L) it would have created one of the all-time cool-looking geysers, but lost the chance for studying the ancient (?) meltwaters, and created a nice sinkhole.
I’d love to see Pooty-Poot served a drilling mud and branch cocktail.
I wonder what that cost? Hell, all they had to do was advertise jumbo perch being caught and the lake would have been covered with ice fishermen with their spuds and augers.....
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