What is Lake Vostok?
Lake Vostok is a remote subglacial lake in Antarctica. Lake Vostok is located using an ice radar, more than two miles (4000 m, 13,000 ft) under the central Antarctic ice layer, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole. Like other lakes, it consists of fresh water and even contains a small island. It is 50 km width and 250 km long to its widest, comparable size with Ontario lake. Lake Vostok is the largest of at least 140 subglacial lakes in Antarctica.
Scientists estimate that Lake Vostok has been sealed under the Antarctic ice cap for 500,000 or more than a million years. Its water is therefore extremely old, unlike typical lakes, where the water is constantly recycled, and any given water molecule has been located in the lake for only six years. Lake Vostok was called "the most intact lake on the ground".
Lake Vostok has an estimated temporal -3 ° C, a few degrees belowBut it remains a liquid because of the huge ice pressure above it. It is also known that Lake Vostok is as a super -oxygen environment, with oxygen levels 50 times higher than the typical lakes on the surface. If the lake contains a microbial life as suspicious, it would need a special adaptation to survive in an oxygen -rich environment. This would also have an isolated gene fund for more than a million years, which is a possibility for biologists. The discovery of life in the lake Vostok would also provide evidence of the hypothesis that life can survive in the subglacial oceans Jovian Moon Europa.
In 1998, an international team of scientists working at Russian Vostok was one of the longest ice cores in the world. They stopped their drilling only 300 feet (120 m) above the suspicious boundary between the water of the lake and the glacier above it. This was to prevent a column of 50 tonnes of Freon and aircraft fuel used to prevent freezing opening of contamin from contamin lake but also to protectScientists performing drilling before a catastrophic explosion caused by pressure release. Lake Vostok is under such a high pressure that the hole could produce high geyser hundreds of feet, destroy any research station on the surface and contaminate the lake with surface microbes.
plans take place in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Laboratory for Cryobot's Development and Deployment, an autonomous robot that would be to melt the ice, deploy communication and power cord as it goes