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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