Russia practically froze new drilling of the subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok, and at the very moment when it came closest to discovering local life.
We all know that after drilling in the depths of Lake Vostok in Antarctica, we found traces of an extremely unusual bacteria. Foreign scientists believe that there are many exotic multicellular organisms in the lake. Their domestic colleagues reject this point of view, but they also believe that the continuation of his research would bring a lot of new things - and would allow them to understand what life might look like in other worlds of the solar system. This will not happen in the near future: the main work at "Vostok", unfortunately, was stopped. If someone makes such discoveries in the lake, then this may be the merit of foreign researchers - and it will happen very soon.
Lake Vostok is a large reservoir of 6,000 cubic kilometers, which is many times larger than in Ladoga. In addition, the East is subglacial, at a depth of almost four kilometers, which is why the pressure there is up to 400 atmospheres, and oxygen and nitrogen have nowhere to go outside of contact with the atmosphere. The waters of the lake saturated with them are a unique environment, which should be the most unfavorable reservoir for life on Earth. But, despite this, there is still life there - at least, this is the opinion of a number of Russian and American scientists who have studied the results of its drilling. Although the estimates of researchers from these two countries on its habitability differ radically, they all believe that they have found traces of local life.
In April 2017, the premiere of the film Lake Vostok. Ridge of Madness”, which described the very difficult conditions in which Russian polar explorers and scientists achieved very significant results in the search for life under several kilometers of Antarctic ice. The film still collects international awards, but history is connected with it and more important than any awards. He raises the topic of the actual stopping of deep clean drilling on Lake Vostok by the forces of the polar station of the same name. Lack of funding has prevented big steps from being made there since 2015. And now at the station several times fewer people than there were at the peak of work. From this, there are practically no hopes for a great discovery of local life under the ice. It's time to take a look at the history of drilling, to understandwhat has been achieved there and what - thanks to the current "freeze" of work - will not be achieved.
Get to the little green men?
There are two points of view on the topic of who exactly lives under the ice between the Vostok station and the lake of the same name. One of them is American, the other is Russian. The first is based on the results of shallower drilling that the United States carried out in the area in the 1990s. Then they managed to get only the ice over the lake - the one that was formed from its waters, gradually rising up and freezing. After analyzing his samples, Scott Rogers' team metagenomic method found there gene sequences of 1,623 species! Of these, six percent belonged to rather complex creatures - eukaryotes, creatures with a separated nucleus, surrounded by a wall. Something so complex was the least expected to be seen at a depth of several kilometers.
Moreover, one of the types of bacteria, presumably found in this way, lives only in the intestines of fish - it simply does not occur separately from them. Gene sequences typical of rotifers and molluscs were also found. From this, the American group concluded that among the inhabitants of Lake Vostok there may be extremely complex creatures, even fish and crustaceans. According to one of the hypotheses, the lake in the form of an open reservoir has existed for tens of millions of years and only the last 14-15 million is hidden by ice.
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This means, the researchers theorize, that local fish and crustaceans had a lot of time to gradually adapt to sub-ice conditions. Moreover, if they are there, they can make the extreme conditions of the East less extreme. Oxygen-breathing organisms could consume the excess oxygen entering the lake along with the ice. Then, in the depths of the lake, there may not be an excess of this gas - a strong oxidizer, next to which life is not easy.
Russian scientists led by Sergei Bulat reacted extremely coldly to this discovery. They quite rightly pointed out that the drilling was carried out using technical fluids contaminated with common soil and other bacteria. It is practically impossible to distinguish external pollution from “local residents” without using “clean drilling”. Domestic researchers believe that in such conditions it is possible to talk about real "Eastern" life only if genetic sequences are found that are completely unlike anything.
And specialists from the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences managed to find there the bacterial DNA, which did not match any of the known species. It is so alien to them that it was not even possible to place it in some group of bacteria. 14 percent of her genes are not found in any other known species. As Sergei Bulat said then, this DNA is so unlike anything else that “if it were found on Mars, they would undoubtedly declare that this is life from Mars. Although it's earthly DNA."
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However, these are bacteria, simple, unicellular, without "bells and whistles" and unnecessary complexity. Genes of something unexpected and even more complex, but at the same time different from terrestrial species, have not yet been found in ice samples. So eukaryotes and even multicellular ones like fish, in the opinion of our scientists, are still canceled there. This may not be bad. Fish, living without light and the supply of nutrients from above, should be so alien to everything that we know that, in fact, they would not be very different from any "green men" from the stories of creative ufologists.
Not so simple
The question of whether there are multicellular organisms in the East is not at all closed here. More recently, scientists have learned that multicellular organisms - mushrooms in particular - can somehow mysteriously survive deep under the seabed. The pressure there is even higher than in the subglacial lake. Apparently, fungi somehow cohabit with chemoautotrophic bacteria, which extract energy from inorganic matter due to its oxidation. Insufficiently oxidized iron compounds, for example, in the composition of olivine, are fuel for such a deep life. Bacteria "burn" it with oxygen and get water.
And at the end of April 2017, it became known that multicellular fungi of the described type can exist under the seabed for 2.4 billion years. Moreover, they arose even before the saturation of the atmosphere with oxygen. That is, contrary to pre-existing views, multicellular and complex life does not need an oxygen atmosphere or favorable conditions on the planet's surface. If this was billions of years ago, it may well be that even today in the subglacial lake there are organisms more complex than bacteria - and much more.
Let's assume for a second that things could be that way. Then the importance of their discovery goes far beyond the limits of our knowledge of earthly life. The fact is that the bowels of Mars, Titan, Enceladus, Europa, Ceres and many other bodies of the system also have an ice cap from above, water from below and high pressure. They are so similar to the conditions of the East that the conclusion suggests itself: if complex life is found under the ice of Antarctica, then it is difficult to exclude its presence in other worlds of the solar system.
Too cold or too hot for a difficult life?
At first glance, it might seem that the main problem of Antarctic sub-ice life is cold. In fact, this may not be the case at all. Yes, the upper layers of the lake are cooled to minus three degrees Celsius. If there were no pressure above 350 atmospheres, there would be ice in their place, only it does not allow such cold water to freeze. And yet, most likely, the lower layers of the lake are much more extreme in terms of temperatures.
Hydrogenophilus thermoluteolus, a thermophilic bacterium, was found in the ice a hundred or two meters above the lake. Although it is quite common there "in appearance" (genes are similar to other known samples), it is very difficult to attribute it to external pollution. And not only because a thermophilic bacterium in Antarctica would be a rather strange contaminant. More importantly, before the ice over the East, it could only be found in hot springs. On the surface, it has nothing much to do - it lives by oxidizing the hydrogen that accumulates where hot water comes into contact with rocks.
Such a "pollutant" almost certainly could not get into kerosene or freon used in drilling from Russia or other parts of the world. The production of such substances is nowhere located in hot springs. On this basis, Russian and French scientists suggest that the same springs are hiding at the bottom of the subglacial lake, through which, in addition to hot water, hydrogen flows, serving as the basis for chemoautotrophic life.
In general, Hydrogenophilus thermoluteolus is far from the biggest extreme among those who live near hot water. People like her live and develop at 40-60 degrees Celsius. The toughest of them are the simpler, unicellular archaea that can tolerate up to 122 degrees Celsius. However, so far, no traces of archaea in the ice above the lake or in samples from it have been found. So if it's hot at the very bottom, then not excessively, not above the boiling point at which bacteria die.
The art of stopping one step from the finish line
Several years ago, deep drilling into the lake's waters began to slow down. To get to this depth, a drill is not suitable: melting water from the ice quickly freezes. It is replaced by non-freezing kerosene or freon. But if such liquids - there may be a lot of bacteria in them - get into the lake waters, it will be very difficult to understand which of those found during drilling is an aboriginal and who is an alien. Russian researchers have long come to the conclusion that on the last tens of meters of ice, and even more so in the lake itself, fundamentally different technologies are needed that exclude contact between the lake water and external fluids.
Alas, this means that new drilling equipment is needed. And its creation - in contrast to the exploitation of the previous one - requires money, albeit by no means on a cosmic scale. So somewhere in 2015, further progress of work was seriously slowed down. The "boring" part of the station's personnel is now only a few people, and once for the implementation of this task, its personnel were brought to tens.
What happened is most likely as if, after October 1957, Khrushchev suddenly said that it was expensive to launch satellites, and did not provide funding for all other space flights. Russian scientists have found the best candidate for an unusual life for a subglacial lake lying at a depth of kilometers. This lake, as many believe, is connected by subsurface channels with other local lakes - and there are dozens of them in Antarctica, Vostok is simply the largest. And suddenly, instead of continuing to work, finding new bacteria or even multicellular organisms, we suddenly abandon the struggle ourselves.
The logic behind this decision is understandable. Khrushchev could not say “play around and that's enough” - he would have lost face due to competitive pressure from the United States. W. Brown was there with his dreams of the moon, and refusal to fly would put the USSR in an uncomfortable position. Unfortunately, malevolent Americans are in no hurry to compete with us in the direction of exploring the most exotic life on earth. For this, the States simply do not have a polar station right above the lake. As a result, the situation may turn into a long halt in our own efforts in this direction.
However, NASA is just thinking about methods of drilling kilometer ice in Europe. Perhaps they will think about testing a mobile drilling complex over the same East. Then it may turn out that the priority in the discovery of the most extreme life under the ice will be with someone else.
Alexander Berezin