Drilling to the Lost Lake

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Scientists Just Drilled Through Thousands of Feet of Ice Into a Mysterious 'Lost' Antarctic Lake

Scientists Just Drilled Through Thousands of Feet of Ice Into a 'Lost' Antarctic Lake
MIKE MCRAE
2 JAN 2019
Antarctica has a new hole. It's more than a kilometre (just under 4,000 feet) deep, barely a hand-span or two in width, and ends in a body of water named Lake Mercer.

Lake Mercer is what's called a 'lost' lake, as it exists deep below the ice, making it inaccessible to usual experiments.

Researchers can now dip into this 'lost' lake and conduct experiments that tell us about the geology and hydrology of a hidden subglacial world, and maybe even find a unique species or two along the way.

It was a celebratory moment for the members of the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) project, who started drilling on the evening of December 23 and reached their goal at a precise depth of 1,084 metres (3,556 feet) on December 26.

salsa_drill_mercer.jpg


If this all sounds a little familiar, scientists also boiled through 800 metres (about 2600 feet) of ice in 2013 to reach a blister of water called Lake Whillans.

At around the same time Russian scientists came within a hair's breadth of the 4 kilometre (2.5 mile) deep Lake Vostok, capturing some of its icy surface water before allowing the hole to freeze shut.

The previous year, a failed attempt was made to tap into Lake Ellsworth. It was abandoned after the drill team unsuccessfully tried to link a pair of bore holes that would dig and recirculate water.

Lake Mercer might not be the first hole, but it's still worth our attention. Analysing its contents is vital if we're to understand how Antarctica's water moves beneath such a thick crust of ice, not to mention the flow of organic carbon and other biological processes.

Full story at site
 
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Reactions: stormhorse
The first thing I thought of was....did they hear anything? Art Bell fabs will get this lol.