The Resurrection of Lake Vostok
"Lake Vostok is the holy grail," says John Priscu, one of America's leading Antarctica researchers. His Russian counterpart, Valery Lukin, agrees. The U. S. made the first flight to the moon, he told a reporter last year. Russia will be the first to Vostok.
The Russian team first began drilling toward the buried Antarctic lake, which has been trapped deep beneath glacial ice for twenty-five million years, three decades ago. They worked meticulously, corkscrewing up pristine ice cores whose gases tell the atmospheric history of our planet. With each turn they got closer to the freshwater, closer to what many believe could be life-forms never seen on earth, perhaps similar to those NASA hopes to find buried on Jupiter's moon Europa. By 1998, the Russians managed to reach down about two miles, drilling to within a few hundred feet of the lake's surface. And then they stopped.
They stopped as a courtesy to their scientific peers, who worried about what lay below the ice and what might happen if the antiquated Russian drills disturbed it.
The Russians know that if they penetrate Lake Vostok, the lubricants and antifreeze present in their borehole will taint the scientific findings, and that the immense pressure the lake is under could spark an explosive geyser that reaches thousands of feet into the sky. But the Russians are no longer deterred. They've waited long enough and have decided that the risks are worth taking.
The drill is achingly close. Soon, probably this winter, it will break through, deflowering our planet's last virgin ecosystem. — Luke Dittrich
http://www.esquire.com/features/looking-forward-0209-9
