Meanwhile, NASA at it again

On 1/8/2011 10:23 AM, Dr.Colon Oscopy wrote:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...ok-antarctica/
As long as were on the topic......Doc

It will be fascinating to see if there's life of some sort down there.
One of the big problems they were worried about regarding drilling into
it was that there could be so much gas dissolved in the water by the
high pressure from the ice over it that if they pierced it the whole
works might come bubbling up the drill hole like a giant geyser as the
gas came out of solution.

Pat

On 1/8/2011 2:04 PM, Dr.Colon Oscopy wrote:

I'm not so sure after reading about the described sample collection
method if a "pristine" sample is in the offing. Hope they don't blow
a 14 million year investment! Oh shades of Mono............Doc
It sounds like what they'll be getting back is a chunk of ice that they
can then slice up and study.
A sample of unfrozen water with any life forms in it still active would
sound like a preferable thing to get, but considering how long the lake
has been cut off from the surface, maybe they would be a bit spooked by
introducing some form of life that's evolved that many million years ago
into the surface environment in a active state.
That sounds a bit paranoid, but I have a friend who grew up in Alaska
and used to drink water from glaciers when out camping when young.
He came down with some sort of illness that resembled hepatitis in its
symptoms that the doctors who treated him said apparently is frozen in a
still viable form in glacial ice deposits of thousands of years age, but
is no longer native in the present Alaskan environment. Took him well
over a year to get over its effects, as they haven't had enough
experience with it to really know how to treat it in a detailed way.
Unlike a lot of supposed "Mars-like" places on the Earth that really
aren't all that much like it at all, conditions in Lake Vostok probably
are a lot like those in the subsurface sea of Europa.
Getting a look at any bacteria down in the lake (I can't actually
picture there being much more than that in it, but who knows?*) will be
interesting in regards to where they get their food and energy from.

*Say Shoggoths, known to inhabit the arcane and unwholesome subterranean
regions of the Antarctic continent:
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskato...s/shoggoth.htm
http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database...ew.pl?id=58504
One of those comes up the borehole and they'll be damned surprised. ;-)

Pat