Drillers found a microbial ecosystem hiding under 800 meters of ice, at the end of this 50-centimeter-wide borehole in the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Image: Alberto Behar/JPL/ASU & NSF/NASA
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Having just completed the tortuous 48-hour journey from the South Pole to the US west coast, John Priscu is suffering from more than his fair share of jet lag. But his tiredness can't mask the excitement in his voice. After weeks of intense field work in Antarctica, he and his team have become the first to find life in a lake trapped under the frozen continent's ice sheet.
“Lake Whillans definitely harbors life,” he says. “It appears that there lies a large wetland ecosystem under Antarctica’s ice sheet, with an active microbiology.”
The lake in question is a 60-square-kilometer body of water that sits on the edge of the Ross Ice shelf in West Antarctica. To reach it, Priscu, a glaciologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, and his team had to drill down 800 meters of ice.
They arrived at their goal on 28 January, when their environmentally clean hot-water drill broke through to the lake's surface. What they found was a body of water just 2 meters or so deep — much shallower than the 10–25 meters seismic surveys had suggested, although Priscu notes that the lake may well have deeper spots.
The team put a camera down the borehole to make sure that the borehole was wide enough for sampling instruments to be deployed and returned safely. It was, and over the next few days, the scientists collected some 30 liters of liquid lake water and eight sediment cores from the lake’s bottom, each 60 centimeters long.
What precious stuff they had retrieved soon became clear under the on-site microscope. Both water and sediment contained an array of microbes that did not need sunlight to survive. The scientists counted about 1,000 bacteria per milliliter of lake water — roughly one-tenth the abundance of microbes in the oceans. In Petri dishes, the bacteria show a “really good growth rate”, says Priscu.
“These are wonderful findings, a major discovery indeed,” says Martin Siegert, an Antarctic researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, who led a UK expedition to Lake Ellsworth, another subglacial body of water on the continent, in December. Unfortunately, technical difficulties halted the UK team’s drilling effort.
Cool and collected
The exact nature of the life unearthed by the US team will now be established by DNA sequencing and other tests. It will take at least a month to do the basic work, says Priscu.
“What we are all dying to find out now is, of course, ‘who’s there’ and ‘what’s their life style',” he says.
Researchers hope that the survival strategies of the subglacial microbes might offer clues to what the biology of extraterrestrial life might be like — Jupiter’s moon Europa, for instance, is thought to host a large sub-surface ocean of water where such life might be able to exist.
As photosynthesis is impossible without sunlight, the Lake Whillans bacteria must get their energy from a different source. This could be existing organic material, or, like the ‘chemotrophs’ found in gold mines and near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, the bacteria might run on chemical reactions involving minerals in the Antarctic bedrock and carbon dioxide dissolved in lake water.
“We have been allowed a glimpse into Antarctica’s subglacial world,” Priscu says. “I’m sure our results will change the way we view that continent.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on February 11, 2013.
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9 Comments
Add CommentYes! This makes me so happy, now let's go to Europa already.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm sure they plugged the whole when they were done, I hope. I wonder if leaving it open could influence the existing live down there. Would it increase it or decrease it? of course that may be unanswerable without test on what was extracted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI thought the Russians were doing something similar, with another lake deeper under the ice. Any news on that?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs of last October, no sign of life in the Russian drilling into Lake Vostok. Shallower subsurface lakes (Lake Vida project), that interact with the outside ocean, have life. This marks the tween juncture, and if all the nutrients were sealed millions of years ago, the bacteria may be the most efficient recycling project on the planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbsolutely! Considering that we always find something living every time we think we've found a lifeless void, I think we are going to find a lot of life on other planets. And I think we are going to find out that the "Goldilocks Zone" is a whole lot bigger than we thought it was.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe hole probably froze over within the day. Most of the possible contamination probably came from the drill bit and the sampling equipment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis reveals the mystery of "Life". Life is everywhere .it is not depended on any matter. Life is there even in vacuum , cosmic vacuum as well as in quantum vacuum, even in vacuum-energy. Life , is more fundamental than "matter".Life- energy is different from matter- energy such as Electromagnetism and gravity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor Life- energy to manifest in our dimensions, need material structure; but that fact does NOT mean that life- energy is the same as matter .
Analogically speaking,light ( or, Electromagnetic energy ),needs lumpen matter to manifest. But that doesn't mean that lumpen matter is the same as the
Electromagnetic energy(EM) . They are different ,in that ,(a) EM is radiating energy whereas matter is lumpen and not radiating energy. (b) Secondly , matter is grainy and "discontinuous" ( having a beginning and ending and something here and there in between the two natural endings and travels in
discrete energy lumps or energy packets . Whereas,radiating EM energy travels as "continuous waves". (c) Matter stores energy whereas radiating energy carries energy and re-distributes it. Matter needs light to become visible and light needs natter to manifest. In matter there's a particular amount of extricable EM energy "e", given by e= mc^2. But still it does not make matter and light the same.
Actually , matter does consist of not just EM energy but also of many other types of energies of which we are not able to measure for want of suitable units of measurement and for want of measuring instruments or devices.
Then, how do you know that matter contains other energies?
One way of realizing it is to draw the straight line graph of the equation e=mc^2 on the Cartesian coordinate system. The region in the graph above the line e=mc^2 indicates the other types of super- luminal energies associated with mass "m", which transcends the electromagnetic energies that travel at or below
the speed of light "c" .
A second instance of such energies is our realization of the existence of dark energy and dark matter indicating energies that are superluminal .
Thirdly , our realization of the existence of " quantum entanglement " points at energies which travel way beyond the speeds of light waves..
"Life- energy" or " bio- energy " is another type of energy than electromagnetic energy.. In fact, some physicists try to relegate bio- energy as an emergent phenomena ,assigning bio- mass made up of matter particles the fundamental role.
This is convincingly disproved in a recent Cambridge research finding that the most fundamental entity in cosmos is not matter or atoms or quarks or strings or super strings but the most fundamental entity in cosmos is "information" . Even matter is an emergent entity .This finding brings mind ( the equipment that processes information ) to the forefront of matter.
Mind manifests only in life- energy. Life energy is an organizing energy which organizes out of natter life- forms or " bio- mass " unlike matter and matter- energies which are dis-organizing energies subject to entropy and degeneration even if it be for attaining cosmic stability.minding an ever vibrant energy like vacuum energy and not a stabilized one .
The most palpable evidence that life-energy is totally different from matter- energies is the fact that despite constant attempts by material physicists they could not produce a single living cell right out of in- organic constituents or raw chemicals without the help of another living cell or portions of living cell in their labs or anywhere else, whereas nature produces it ball around so prolifically under all seemingly surprising environments like under deep ice, or in deep space or in comets and distant galaxies wherever .
It's time that bio- scientists divorce amicably from physicists and set their own different ways finding newer paradigms to express the tenets and principles of bio- life delinking it from bio- mass.
The phenomena bio- scientists need to exploit are those which physicists have got stuck up with , phenomena such as "quantum entanglement " , "advance waves", pilot waves ", "coherence , decoherence" principles, effects like the "reverse Zeno effects", "probability waves" and "uncertainty principles" which have emanated not from physical experiments but rather from " thought experiments " , and mathematical models ; abstract mathematics being a product of mind than of matter .
to Sault,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiscontamination from the drill "bit" was not likely. They used an "environmentally clean hot-water drill".
Really interesting research. Given the depth of the ice, how long was this lake isolated from the rest of earth biology? IIRC, the lake the Russians are investigating was isolated on the order of 100,000 years?
As they point out, there has to be some source of energy for long term sustainability. Europa may have thermal heating from tidal forces made by Jupiter.
I found the article on the Russian drilling. Here's key information from the article:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Lake Vostok, roughly the size of Lake Ontario, lies in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, and is buried beneath 2 miles (3.7 kilometers) of ice. The lake itself is likely almost as old as the ice sheet that covers it — around 14 million years old — and the water within could be 1 million years old, according to rough estimates.
Scientists suspect that Vostok and other Antarctic lakes, long secreted beneath the ice, are home to cold-loving organisms that have been left to their own evolutionary devices for hundreds of thousands of years."
So this team drilled 800m in lake isolated for unreported years. They reached the lake in one season it looks like.
The Russian team is drilling 3.7Km to a lake isolated between 1 and 14 million years. They haven't reached teh lake yet.
here's the other article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=russian-scientists-poised