WHY POLARS FROM RUSSIA DISCOVER AN ANCIENT LAKE UNDER THE ICE OF ANTARCTIDA AND WHY ARE FLIGHTS TO JUPITER HERE
On January 25, members of the Russian Antarctic expedition drilled a well into the relict Lake Vostok, which had been isolated from the outside world for millions of years. Perhaps this lake is home to "alien" organisms, unlike anything known today, but similar to those that can exist in the subglacial oceans of Jupiter's moons - Europa or Ganymede.
Formally, this is the second successful attempt, the first time a well was drilled into the lake in 2012 - and immediately blocked. This time, the channel between the lake and the surface can be kept open for a long time, and scientists will be able to figure out in detail whether someone lives in eternal darkness under four kilometers of ice - in the water or at the bottom of the strangest lake in the world.
Unless this program is closed. Due to the sharp rise in the dollar exchange rate, the very work of Russian polar explorers in Antarctica is in question, and the decision to continue the FTP "World Ocean", from which many scientific projects in the Arctic and Antarctica were financed, has not yet been made. It is possible that one of the largest scientific projects of the USSR and Russia, begun back in 1957, will be frozen just before it begins to bring really sensational and critical results. There is a risk that the first generation of Russian astrobiologists will never cross this threshold.
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The whole story began more than half a century ago, when in December 1957 a sled-tractor train led by the future academician Alexei Treshnikov reached the center of the icy continent, to the point where Vostok station was created. It was named so in honor of the sloop "Vostok" - Thaddeus Bellingshausen's sailing ship, on which he sailed to discover Antarctica in 1819.
You need to imagine what it is - the East. The nearest coast is 1260 kilometers from here, and the nearest station Mirny is 1410 kilometers. Even in summer, the temperature does not rise above 35 degrees below zero, and the record heat is minus 14 degrees. Actually, here is the earth's pole of cold, in the East a temperature record was recorded - 89.2 degrees below zero. The air here is extremely dry, the eternal cold freezes all moisture from the air. At the same time, the station is located almost in the center of the giant Antarctic glacier, at an altitude of about 4 thousand meters. This means that hypoxia is added to the desert dryness and frost - the lack of oxygen that people usually face in the mountains.
In the 1960s, the ice was going to be drilled with a miniature nuclear reactor that would have melted the glacier through and through.
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You can get here only in summer: in winter, during the polar night, airplanes cannot get here. Serious cargoes - mostly barrels of diesel fuel for a diesel power plant - are transported on sled-tractor trains.
What brought the Soviet people into this horrible icy desert? To say that only scientific interest is deceitful. The work of research stations in no man's land and demilitarized Antarctica is something like a "display of the flag" in the ocean. We need to show: we are here, this is our sector, allocated to us under the Antarctic Treaty, and no one can occupy it, taking advantage of our absence.
In 1960, at Vostok station, drilling of the glacier began - with the help of homemade thermal drilling shells, it was possible to penetrate to a depth of 50 meters. A project was considered for drilling through ice using a miniature nuclear reactor, which would have to melt through the glacier. Drilling began in earnest in 1967, when professionals from the Leningrad Mining Institute arrived in the East. The first well was drilled in the ice, 560 meters deep.
Then no one knew about the existence of Lake Vostok - scientists were drilling in order to obtain a glacial core, that is, an ice column. The glacier in the center of Antarctica is slowly growing, if you drill a well and get a core, you will have ice in your hands hundreds of thousands of years old. Each air bubble in such ice is something like a fly in amber, a preserved ancient artifact that allows one to judge the state of the atmosphere in the deep past. Therefore, the ice core from Vostok station is considered one of the main sources of data on the history of climate on Earth.
By 1998, when the 5G-1 well in the East reached a depth of 3623 meters, scientists obtained a continuous series of climatic data for 420 thousand years. It turned out that during this time on Earth there were four ice ages, accompanied by a drop in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and found that the current concentration of carbon dioxide is a record high over the past half a million years. The theory of global warming grew out of just such observations. Data from the East was later expanded and corroborated by data from other ice core projects, including the Antarctic European EPICA project and similar projects in Greenland.
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In the late 1980s, polar explorers acquired a new target - Lake Vostok. This gigantic subglacial lake is comparable in size to the State of Qatar (or a third of Baikal), and it is called the last major geographical discovery on Earth in history. But this discovery was not made overnight. Back in 1876, Prince Peter Kropotkin - he was not only an anarchist, but also a professional geographer - wrote that the temperature in the lower layers of powerful glaciers can rise greatly under pressure: in other words, it is warm under the polar ice. In the early 1960s, Soviet scientists calculated that at the bottom of the Antarctic glacier, the ice temperature may exceed the melting point, which means that accumulations of melt water may be present on the continental bed.
The first hints of the existence of Lake Vostok under a layer of ice appeared when, in 1959 and 1964, Soviet scientists, led by the geographer from Moscow State University, Andrei Kapitsa (son of the Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa and brother of Sergei Kapitsa), conducted seismic sounding of the glacier. Then scientists were able to measure its thickness, and in addition to the reflection from the bottom of the glacier, they saw another signal, which they took outside the boundary of the layer of sedimentary rocks under the glacier. We now understand that these "sedimentary rocks" were lake water.
In the mid-1970s, British scientists, as a result of radar sounding of a glacier in the center of Antarctica, discovered areas with "flat" reflection. Then, for the first time, a hypothesis was put forward that this is a reflection from the "ice-water" boundary. The largest such site was found near Vostok station.
In 1996, Andrei Kapitsa, Igor Zotikov from the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences and their British colleagues summarized in an article published in the journal Nature, all radar and satellite observations and made the final conclusion - at a depth of about four kilometers under the ice there is a lake with a total area of about 10 thousand square kilometers and an average depth of about 125 meters.
There is a cold pole at Vostok station. It was here that the lowest temperature on Earth was recorded - minus 89.2 degrees Celsius.
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By that time, well 5G-1 had been drilled to a depth of 3100 meters, and by 1998 - to a depth of 3623 meters. According to calculations, about 120 meters remained to Lake Vostok. But drilling was stopped at the request of the International Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR). Russian polar explorers had to present an "environmentally friendly technology" that would exclude the ingress of external pollution into the relict lake.
The pause dragged on for eight years. During this time, French and American scientists who participated in drilling and paleoclimatic studies (and received a third of the core sample) left the project, and the drilling project became a national Russian project.
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How not to spoil the lake? Drilling such deep holes in a glacier is no less difficult than rock. The well, left to itself, will quickly "float" and disappear, you need to make special efforts so that the drill is not frozen into the ice, does not get stuck in it. Over the 40-year history in the East, several drilling shells have been lost, stuck at depth or frozen into the ice.
To preserve the well, it was filled with a drilling fluid - a mixture of aviation kerosene and freon, which kept the well from freezing. The walls of the upper part of the well were reinforced with plastic casing strings. SCAR feared that the drilling fluid could contaminate Lake Vostok if it enters Lake Vostok.
In 1999 Russian scientists presented their proposals to the organization of the Antarctic Treaty. Their idea was to use the high pressure of the water in the lake, which is floating on top of almost four kilometers of ice. If the amount of drilling fluid in the well is not enough to compensate for the pressure from below, the lake water will simply push the column of drilling fluid upward and then freeze, forming a natural plug between the lake and the outside world. In order to prevent direct contact of water with the drilling fluid, Russian scientists suggested using an inactive "gasket" - a layer of a liquid polymer based on silicon, polydimethylsiloxane.
But international experts demanded that the effectiveness of this method be proven in practice. The head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition Valery Lukin was indignant: “We were told: where did you test this technology, you have only theoretical developments, find some other lake in Antarctica … But you understand - for this you need to create a new separate infrastructure, this huge funds!"
However, Russian scientists did not have to look for a "test lake". In 2003, the European NGRIP (North Greenland Ice Core Project) reached a subglacial lake in northern Greenland at a depth of 3,085 meters. And the penetration into the lake happened exactly according to the scenario described earlier by Russian experts: after penetration, the water rose 45 meters up the well, and the toxic mixture of kerosene and freon did not enter the lake.
In 2004, drilling was resumed - it turned out that in seven years the well had not deformed enough to start all over again. In 2007, two times in a row, the drill got stuck and detached from its cable at a depth of 3660 meters. Therefore, in January 2009, drilling began to bypass the emergency area from a 20-meter elevation.
Finally, on February 5, 2012, at a depth of 3769.3 meters, the drill reached the water of Lake Vostok. Scientists somewhat underestimated the pressure in the lake, and the lake water rose through the well about 500 meters upward, pushing the drilling fluid, which splashed out of the well. After lifting the drill, the first samples of lake water mixed with drilling fluid fell into the hands of scientists. It was this yellowish liquid that the polar explorers later brought with them as a gift to Putin when they were invited to meet with the prime minister in the Kremlin.
Over the next two years, polar explorers drilled out lake water frozen in a well to obtain samples of fresh lake ice. Drilling continued this year, with the drill going at a slight angle to the well to hit the lake at a different point. Finally, on the evening of January 25, Russian scientists again reached Lake Vostok.
This time everything was calculated more accurately, and the lake water rose only 45 meters.
“We wanted the pressure to be practically the same, so that the water did not rise too high and that the water was a“plug”between the lake and the well, which could be drilled quickly,” says Andrei Dmitriev from the St. Petersburg Gorny University, where from the Soviet times, they developed drilling technologies for the East. In the future, he says, it will be possible to install a special heated device at the bottom of the well, which will keep it open. Through these "gates" it will be possible to pass probes to study the thickness of the lake and its bottom.
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Lake Vostok has been isolated from the outside world for millions of years, and if there is life in it, it is most likely completely unlike anything we know today. However, the conditions there are very reminiscent of the situation on one of Jupiter's moons - Europa. A liquid ocean is hidden under the thick ice shell of this celestial body. The water in it is heated by the warmth of Europa's bowels, which do not cool down due to the tidal action of Jupiter's gravity.
The chances of finding life on Europa are even higher than on Mars, since there has been no liquid water on Mars for billions of years, but Europe has it now. In many ways, the conditions in Lake Vostok are similar to "European" ones. Eternal darkness and the possible presence of sources of geothermal heat allow only chemoautotrophic organisms to exist - that is, those that live by chemical reactions and are able to do without the sun. Such organisms on Earth have been found near deep-sea hot springs - "black smokers".
Ice, 420 thousand years old, which was pulled out of the well, helped to give birth to the theory of global warming.
Scientists from the very beginning of the 2000s see Lake Vostok as a convenient testing ground for developing technologies for finding life in Europe.
“Subglacial Lake Vostok can be considered as the only extremely clean body of water on Earth that can serve as a unique testing ground for finding elusive traces of life on icy bodies, such as the Jupiterian moon Europa,” wrote scientists from the group of Sergei Bulat, an employee of the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. in Advances in Space Research.
The first microorganisms that could belong to the lake ecosystem were found back in 1999. Then the well 5G at a depth of 3538 meters first entered the ice layer from the frozen lake water. NASA issued a special statement highlighting the similarities between Europe's East and Ocean.
In 2004, a group led by Bulat identified the DNA of thermophilic bacteria living near hot springs in water samples from lake ice at 50-52 degrees above zero. Scientists wrote that the water of the lake mass is close to the freezing point (due to high pressure, the freezing point of water is below zero: this is approximately minus two degrees Celsius), so microorganisms can originate from the outskirts of the East, where there can be geothermal outlets in the rift zones. However, in all these cases, it was a question of single bacteria, and in addition, it was impossible to exclude the possibility of contamination - contamination of the samples with "foreign" bacteria.
The moment of truth came in 2012, when the first samples of fresh lake water fell into the hands of scientists. The research was undertaken by the PNPI cryoastrobiology group under the leadership of Bulat.
Station "Vostok", 1984 / RIA Novosti
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Sergei Bulat, when talking about his expectations, stressed that we can talk about absolutely "alien" life. The fact is that the water of the lake must have an extremely high concentration of oxygen (up to 0.7-1.3 grams of oxygen per liter) - the water is formed from a melting "atmospheric glacier" saturated with oxygen, and the newly freezing water does not contain it. Science does not know such oxygenophiles now. On the other hand, bacteria can exist at the bottom or in bottom sediments, at the border of two environments.
The first data were presented by Bulat's group in the fall of 2012 at a conference in Stockholm, but they turned out to be zero - scientists could not find anything but pollution (biologists themselves call them the elegant term "contaminants"). However, by March 2013, analysis of other samples revealed something interesting - bacterial DNA that was not in the library of contaminants and was not among the already known gene sequences of bacteria in the Genbank database.
Bulat made a presentation on these results at a conference at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and his message caused a sensation: an unknown bacterium was found in Lake Vostok! The Arctic and Antarctic Institute even had to issue a special statement that this bacterium poses no threat to people.
Other scientists were skeptical about the data of Bulat's group. First, they got samples of ice chipped from a drill and mixed approximately one-to-one with a drilling fluid (that is, with kerosene and freon). Secondly, it could not be ruled out that this is another contaminant, simply not included in the library of contaminants.
A year later, samples of "clean" ice from a newly drilled well fell into the hands of Bulat's group. In 2014, he presented a new report at the COSPAR conference in Moscow, where he said that a total of 49 species of bacteria were found in ice samples, all of them were contaminants, except for two that could not be classified and identified using the available gene databases.
However, these results have not yet been published in a scientific journal, and Bulat's group itself notes that new water samples from the lake are needed to obtain one hundred percent proof.
Lake Vostok has been isolated from the outside world for millions of years. And if there is life in it, then it is most likely completely unlike anything we know today.
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Re-drilling and a relatively small "plug" left at the bottom of the well will make it possible to systematically explore the lake.
“The pressure will be balanced, and it will be possible to enter the lake with probes and study the lake, water and everything below. Take water samples not frozen, but in a “live” form,”says Vyacheslav Martyanov, deputy head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition.
According to Andrei Dmitriev, specialists from Gorny have already created and tested a probe that can reach the bottom of the lake and drill through bottom sediments.
“We believe that bottom sediments are about 10 meters thick. There, as at the bottom of any lake, there is silt, and those who study life are interested in silt,”said Dmitriev.
However, this year the probe will not get into the lake. In February, the winter season begins in the East, the drillers leave until the next southern summer - and in Antarctica, as in the entire Southern Hemisphere, it comes when it is winter in Europe and the United States. However, whether it will be "summer" is a question. It is possible that drilling at Vostok station will be curtailed due to lack of money.
“Since 2014, we have been doing science at our own expense, without targeted government funding … And the latest news - the RAE is forced to cut costs … So far, we are not talking about the complete closure of the station, but about curtailing seasonal work, but for Russian science this will be a serious blow, one of the expedition members Alexei Ekaikin writes in his blog.
The problem is that a significant part of the RAE expenses is in foreign currency. These are flights, transportation of goods, fuel. With the growth of the exchange rate, they all grew many times over.
Back in June, at a meeting with Putin, the director of the AARI, Ivan Frolov, spoke about the need to extend the World Ocean program, which financed the research of Lake Vostok. The draft program for the period from 2015 to 2030 exists, but it has not yet been approved, which means that the further fate of the project is unknown.
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In parallel with drilling a well to Lake Vostok, the Americans and the British launched their own projects to explore the Antarctic subglacial lakes. In particular, American scientists, using jets of hot water, drilled a well to the small Willans Lake, located at a depth of about 800 meters. However, Willans Lake is a flowing body of water, it is not at all isolated, like the East, therefore the degree of its interest for scientists is much lower.
The UK project to drill a well to Antarctic Lake Ellsworth, which began in December 2012, was significantly more ambitious. This lake is located at a depth of about 3 kilometers and isolated from the outside world for about 500 thousand years. The British scientists intended to drill a well with near-boiling water and do all the work in five days, not spend years drilling mechanically. However, 13 days after the start, on December 25, the project was canceled due to technical problems - they managed to pass only 300 meters of the glacier.
Therefore, the Russian project remains unique for now.
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Anyone who is engaged in the study of life in all sorts of unpleasant places - in the vents of volcanoes, in the depths of the oceans, in the stratosphere - necessarily talk about the prospects for the search for life outside the Earth. Perhaps this is rhetoric aimed at the ears of those who provide funding. After all, the study of terrestrial life is no less important without an astrobiological perspective.
But the prospect of searching not just yet unknown bacteria, but "aliens" always excites the public, so researchers are generous and give the public the right "rhyme".
The prospects for finding life in real Europe are still very far from being realized. In the early 2000s, the European Space Agency (ESA) considered the Laplace project to explore Europe, including with the participation of Russia. NPO named after Lavochkin even worked out options for the landing "European" module.
However, data on high levels of radiation (Europa's orbit passes through Jupiter's radiation belts) forced them to reconsider their plans - in 2012 ESA officially approved the project of the JUICE probe, which will mainly explore Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. It can also have an under-ice ocean, although not as impressive as in Europe. The device should start in 2022, there is no talk of sending a lander.
Russian scientists are proposing to send landing and orbital modules to Ganymede. But so far their proposals are not even included in the draft of the Federal Space Program from 2015 to 2025 (although the program itself has not yet been adopted, and in the light of the new reform of Roscosmos, one cannot expect that it will pay much attention to science).
NASA's 2015 budget includes funds for the initial study of a mission to Europe - $ 15 million. Until this project is included in the program, we are talking only about preliminary estimates. If all goes according to plan, the probe could launch around 2025, but this will be an orbital probe that has yet to select sites for future landing.
But NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is already funding the development of a robotic ice driller. One such project - Cryobot - was tested in Norway back in 2002. Another - VALKYRIE - involves a return to the ideas of the 1950s and drilling (more precisely, melting) ice using a nuclear reactor.
There is no need to wait for an expedition to Europe earlier than in 10-15 years, and another 7-8 years for the flight to the Jupiter system itself. Most space programs concentrate on Mars exploration tasks.
The author thanks Andrei Dmitriev, Associate Professor of the Department of Well Drilling of the Oil and Gas Faculty of the NMSU "Gorny", and Sergei Bulat, Head of the Cryoastrobiology Laboratory of the Department of Molecular and Radiation Biophysics of the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics, for the advice and materials provided.
Ilya Ferapontov