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Analysis of ice cores obtained from the basin of Lake Vostok, the subglacial lake that Russian scientists drilled down to in 2012, have revealed DNA from an estimated 3,507 organisms. While the majority were found to be bacteria, many of which were new to science, there were also other single celled organisms and multicellular organisms found, including from fungi. The diversity of life from the lake has surprised scientists as many had thought the lake would be sterile due to the extreme conditions. Lake Vostok was first covered by ice more than 15 million years ago and is now buried...

Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples. Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years. This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "We are calling this life form unclassified...

Russian scientists believe they have found a wholly new type of bacteria in the mysterious subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Thursday. The samples obtained from the underground lake in May 2012 contained a bacteria which bore no resemblance to existing types, said Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," he said. "We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - An expansive ecosystem of knee-high mud volcanoes, snowy microbial mats and flourishing clam communities lies beneath the collapsed Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica, say researchers. The discovery made in February in a deep glacial trough in the northwestern Weddell Sea was detailed this week in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union. Such sunless, cold-vent ecosystems have been found elsewhere — near Monterey, Calif., in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Sea of Japan — but never in Antarctica, the report said. "Seeing those organisms on the ocean bottom, it's like lifting the carpet...

Ancient mega-catastrophe paved way for the dinosaurs, spawned Australian continent. Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land...

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/icecores-02a.html Antarctic Ice Drilling Reaches Milestone Paris - Jan 28, 2002 European scientists have reached the two-thirds mark in one of the most ambitious ice-core projects, a scheme to drill through more than three kilometers (two miles) of Antarctic ice sheet and strike bedrock. A 22-member team of scientists and drillers from the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) has reached exactly 2,002 metres (6,506 feet), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said. Battling plunging temperatures as the brief Antarctic summer draws to a close, they will finish this phase of the drilling by the end of January, then ...

Ancient fungus 'revived' in lab The fungi (blue streak) were isolated from deep sea sediments Fungus from a deep-sea sediment core that is hundreds of thousands of years old can grow when placed in culture, scientists have discovered. Indian researchers say the fungi come from sediments that are between 180,000 and 430,000 years old. The finding adds to growing evidence for the impressive survival capabilities of many microorganisms. They are the oldest known fungi that will grow on a nutrient medium, the scientists say in Deep Sea Research I. The core was drilled from a depth of 5,904m in the...

U.S. Denies “Spectacular Ruins” in Antarctica Captured on Video WASHINGTON, D.C. (AMP) – The U.S. government said it will seek to block the airing of a video found by Navy rescuers in Antarctica that purportedly reveals that a massive archeological dig is underway two miles beneath the ice. The @lantisTV production crew that shot the video is still missing. Attorneys for Beverly Hills-based @lantisTV stressed that the company’s primary concern is for the safety and welfare of its crew. But they stated they will “vigorously oppose” any attempts to “censor material that is clearly in the public interest and...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 January 28 The Lost World of Lake Vida Credit & Copyright: Thomas Nylen & Andrew Fountain (PSU), NASA, NSF Explanation: A lake hidden beneath 19 meters of ice has been found near the bottom of the world that might contain an ecosystem completely separate from our own. In a modern version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic book Lost World, scientists are now plotting a mission to...

Researchers recently uncovered a startling phenomenon — a set of teardrop-shaped lakes in Antarctica that mysteriously move, jogging along at a pace as fast as 5 feet (1.5 meters) per day. The lakes sit atop the George VI ice shelf — a massive floating plain of ice larger than Vermont, composed of the mingled fronts of glaciers that flow off the edge of the continent and rest on the ocean. Glaciologist Doug MacAyeal at the University of Chicago, and student researcher C.H. LaBarbera, noticed the traveling bodies of water while studying satellite images of 11 ice shelf lakes captured between...

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...

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...

As my colleague David M. Herszenhorn reports, scientists are poised to take some highly anticipated samples from a deep subglacial lake in Antarctica, saying on Wednesday that they had succeeded in boring through more than two miles of ice. The state-financed broadcaster Russia Today posted video of the researchers at the frigid Antarctic outpost, including clips of them snowmobiling around the endless expanse of ice and snow and watching supply planes land. What evolutionary secrets Lake Vostok — named after the Russian research station above it — may hold after being sealed under ice for millions of years has tantalized...

Researchers have uncovered a complex subglacial system miles under the ice where rivers larger than the Amazon link a series of "lake districts," which may teem with mineral-hungry microbes. This watery environment may be more than one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, scientists say, which would make it the world's largest wetland... Studinger's research focuses on "recovery lakes," part of a a series of cascading lakes found earlier this year under the ice sheet. The lakes... ebb and flow as they empty into the polar sea. They stay fluid because the ice sheet above acts like a gigantic...

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- If Russian researchers in Antarctica succeed in drilling through the final 396 feet of nearly 2-1/2 miles of ice to reach an ancient, unexplored lake underneath, scientists at NASA warn the hole could cause an eruption that spews water thousands of feet into the air. The American scientists speculate that the water in pristine Lake Vostok, filled with gases and pressurized under tons and tons of ice, would act like a carbonated drink in a can that's shaken and then popped open. Their concern is that the lake water, which has not been exposed to Earth's...

There’s some surprising reaction to the press release we covered on WUWT recently. Here’s some excerpts: Knowing how the massive ice sheets atop  Antarctica and Greenland work is key to predicting how global warming could raise sea  levels and flood coastal cities. But a new study  upends what scientists thought they knew. It  turns out it’s not just ancient snow that makes  up the ice sheets, but water deep under the  sheets also thaws and refreezes over time. To put it in non-scientific terms, lead scientist  Robin Bell told msnbc.com, the study redefines “how squishy” the base of ice sheets...

Oldest ever ice core promises climate revelations An ice core recently shipped from Antarctica has yielded its first, eagerly awaited results. The tests confirm that the 3200-metre core dates back at least 750,000 years, making the ice the oldest continuous core ever retrieved.Gases and particles trapped in the layers of an ice core provide information about the Earth's climate and atmosphere. Oxygen and hydrogen isotopes reveal the temperature when the ice formed, for example, while high carbon dioxide and methane levels indicate periods of global warming.A group of research teams called the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA)...

Antarctic Ice Core over 500,000 Years Old Extracted CAMBRIDGE, UK, March 14, 2002 (ENS) - Ice more than half a million years old has been taken from deep below the East Antarctic ice sheet, setting what is believed to be a new record. The multi-nation European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) drilling at Dome Concordia has recovered ice believed to be around 530,000 years old, according to the British Antarctic Survey. Previously the Russian Vostok ice core, dating back 420,000 years, was regarded as the oldest ice to be drilled from Antarctica. The EPICA team, from 10...

Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, seen from NASA's Terra satellite. NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS; U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team. Antarctica is so vast that the pictures give you no sense of scale. The pencil-thin line across the satellite image of Pine Island Glacier (above) is actually more than 18 miles long, 800 feet across in places, and 180 feet deep.

An American professor and expert of the Antarctic said he believes contact with a team of Russian scientists that has not made contact with colleagues in the U.S for seven days has merely been busy as they drill into a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice for 20 million years. Professor John Priscu told usnews.com in an email that the crews have been working ‘round the clock’ to beat the end of Antarctic summer, which ends Tuesday. Afterwards, temperatures will fall to deadly levels.