FRESHWATER LAKE IN ANTARTICA
June 21, 1996 / July 6, 1996
Source: Reuter
Russian and British scientists reported yesterday they had
found a giant, freshwater lake lying under an Antarctic
glacier.
The lake, up to a million years old, could yield a horde
of ancient bacteria and micro-organisms, researchers said.
Gordon Robin of the Scott Polar Research Institute at
Cambridge University and a team including scientists
at Moscow State University used satellite measurements
and sonar surveys to measure the lake, which lies just
under Russia's Vostok drilling station.
"The lake is deep (mean depth of 125 metres or more) and
fresh, and ... it has ... dimensions comparable with
those of Lake Ontario," they wrote in the science journal
Nature.
"Lake Vostok, as it is now called, may be a unique
habitat for ancient bacterial life," J Cynan Ellis-Evans
and David Wynn-Williams of the British Antarctic Survey
wrote in a review of the research.
"Around 70 other sub-glacial water bodies are known to
exist under the central Antarctic ice sheet, so this
lake may be part of a vast hydrological system."
Charles Bently at the Polar Research Centre at the
University of Wisconsin said such lakes form when
glaciers are melted from underneath by geothermal heat.
"It is the sheer size of Lake Vostok, comparable in area
to Lake Ontario and in depth perhaps even to Russia's
Lake Baikal, that makes this new description so
startling," Bentley wrote in a second commentary in
Nature. (Reuter)
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