CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 7 (UPI) -- Scientists are working on plans to retrieve samples from an ancient lake buried beneath 2.5 miles of ice in the Antarctic.
Despite the absence of light, microbes and possibly more complex life forms are believed to exist in the frigid waters, said John Priscu, a Montana State University researcher who heads an international team of scientists developing plans to explore Lake Vostok.
While Antarctica contains about 90 lakes buried beneath its ice, one in particular that has captured researchers' attention is Lake Vostok, which is as large and deep as one of the Great Lakes of North America. Priscu believes Lake Vostok's waters have been isolated for millions of years and may be home to unique life forms.
"The water appears to have been disconnected 15- to 20 million years ago," said Priscu. "It probably was a lake before the ice sheet covered Antarctica."
While the lake water has not yet been directly sampled yet, ice drilled out of a 3,623-meter long hole -- the deepest ice core in the world -- that overlays the lake showed evidence of microbes that lived in water that had melted and then refroze above Lake Vostok.
The researchers found bacteria related to microbes commonly associated with soil. Priscu said the microbes could have been blown onto the ice sheet with dirt from the Patagonian deserts and then buried, or the microbes could have originated in the lake and became trapped as the water refroze or accreted to the bottom of the overlying glacier.
U.S. and Russian scientists are leading the effort to explore Lake Vostok through an international partnership that oversees Antarctic research. In addition to safeguarding the environment, scientists are very concerned about retrieving samples without exposing them to modern day microbes.
Developing the technology to pristinely sample the lake waters and possibly the lakebed will take years, the researchers say.
"The scientific goals should define the requirements (of the program) but the state of the technology may proscribe the goals," said Karl Erb, head of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Program.
The issues and concerns posed by exploring Lake Vostok are similar to the technical and scientific challenges facing researchers who want to explore Jupiter's moon Europa, which is believed to have a liquid ocean underneath its frozen crust.
NASA has funded preliminary development of an orbiter to study the moon that is scheduled for launch in 2008. NASA researchers see Lake Vostok as a model Europa on Earth.
"Our results extend the possible limits for life on Earth and elsewhere in the universe," said David Karl, a lead Lake Vostok researcher with the University of Hawaii.
"With each discovery of life in another extreme Earth environment we learn that much more about microbial adaptation, and survival, and physiological strategies for life."
Added Priscu: "If we can learn about if we can learn about the evolution of life on Earth, it'll make it a heck of a lot easier to detect and understand life on other planets."
