Russia poised to breach mysterious Antarctic lake | Hacker News Reader

Russia poised to breach mysterious Antarctic lake

reuters.com

70 pointsgeorgecmu42 comments

Anybody else hearing H.P. Lovecraft echoes here?

Antarctica? Check. Mysterious underground lake? Check. Driven scientists? Check. Extremely isolated location? Check.

Here's how I see it going down:

Drill pierces lake; eldritch horror escapes or is otherwise unleashed as consequence of scientific hubris; Vostok station's radio transmissions cease suddenly; a team is sent to investigate... maybe they find the sole survivor of the original drill crew (he's gone horribly insane, of course), eking out an existence in what remains of the research station... he warns the investigators not to go down to the drill site...

And don't forget the Antarctic mountain range they discovered in 2008 (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16659-alpine-mountain-...) that exactly fits the description to the mountains of madness Lovecraft described so vividly. But it won't be the Eldritch Horror coming out of the lake, it'll be a Shoggoth (or God forbid, a multitude).

These driven scientists never, never listen!

I'm hearing Half Life 2: Episode 3 echoes.

> eldritch horror escapes or is otherwise unleashed as consequence of scientific hubris

I, for one, welcome our new dark overlords...

Also pretty much exactly what happened in Evangelion's Second Impact.

and Alien vs. Predator

You may want to checkout Gog and Magog

http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Gog_and_Magog

In the islamic tradition (Yajuj and Majuj):-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gog_and_Magog#In_Islamic_tradit...

"It's minus 40 (Celsius) outside," Turkeyev said.

Celsius, Fahrenheit, what's the difference?

Weird part is this quote precedes that quote in the article:

"It was here that the coldest temperature ever found on Earth -- minus 89.2 Celsius (minus 128.6 Fahrenheit) -- was recorded."

So it seems the writer wasn't simply just writing from a Celsius perspective and felt the need to clarify a quote (from no units to units).

Maybe the writer was actually quoting, and the speaker felt the need to say "Celsius" because they couldn't tell whether they were speaking to an American. (Satellite phones probably have low sound quality, right?)

Okay, I have to admit, your post is bloody brilliant. -40 is exactly where the two scales meet.

Astounding.

I came here to say that. It appears that we are both smartasses.

Reamur, Kelvin... what's the difference :)

Negative 40 Kelvin has no meaning ;)

That's what you think. Who says there can't be a -1 degree Kelvin? Just because it doesn't make any sense sense to us whatsoever right now doesn't mean it couldn't exist.

Do I know how to reach -1 degree Kelvin? No. But 1920's physicists didn't know how to destroy entire cities in Japan with a hunk of metal, either.

It has some meaning. It's hotter than any positive temperature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature :-D

Actually, there are systems that have negative (absolute) temperature, and "a system with a truly negative Kelvin temperature is hotter than any system with a positive temperature".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

These are strange systems that can absorb only a finite amount of energy. When they are almost "full" of energy, their temperature is negative. (For simple systems the negative temperature appears when they have more than the 50% of the maximal energy, but it depends on the system.)

This can not happen in normal systems. For example an ideal gas can absorb infinite energy, because the molecules can go faster and faster.

No, but +574 is the same in Kelvin or Fahrenheit :)

"The borehole, pumped full of Kerosene and Freon to keep it from freezing shut, hangs poised over the pristine lake.

The explorers now face the question: How do we go where no one has gone before without spoiling it [...]"

Oh, I don't know... how about start by not dumping in thousands of gallons of _freon_?

that jumped out at me too, but one has to think that a bunch of clearly dedicated scientists (I'd have gone home at -10) would have given thought to pumping CFC's into a pristine lake.

Let's hope so

Actually CFCs are not at all bad. They are incredibly stable chemical compounds that won't normally react with anything else.

The problem with CFCs is that you get a stable compound by reacting really reactive things together, and now they can't find anything they want to react with more. So when they get into the upper atmosphere and get broken apart by hard radiation, you now have really reactive stuff mixed in with the fragile ozone layer. And they act as a catalyst to break down ozone.

But you can breathe them all you want, and (assuming you got enough oxygen) will suffer no ill effects.

I wouldn't be so hopeful. One of my professors who works in Antarctica and drills lots of ice cores was bemoaning the Russian mismanagement of the Vostok drilling project.

I think this was the old borehole, they specifically didn't penetrate the lake so as to not contaminate it. They're using a different method or an adjacent hole with a sanitized drilling apparatus now. This is based on stories I've read about Vostok over the years, I don't have any extra knowledge on the situation there today.

The lake is massive. Thousands of gallons of freon would barely register as a contaminant. Moreover, the pressure of the water would tend to push up through the borehole (although Freon is slightly denser than water so some will likely seep down through the water column).

The real issue isn't potential chemical contaminants, but biological contamination. It's thought that the lake has been cut off from the rest of earth's biosphere for millennia. It's likely a biological time-capsule, but breaching the seal could expose it to modern life that could take over.

> Moreover, the pressure of the water would tend to push up through the borehole

That's the plan actually! The water would rush up and then freeze sealing the opening and keeping the ecosphere uncontaminated. It is not the freon that would be the problem but the bacteria that they would introduce in the lake. Now hopefully they have some contingency plan for bacteria contaminating our side of the ecosphere ;-)

I had read in an earlier article that their approved methodology was to pull back the instant they detected liquid water---which, due to the pressure of the ice sheet, would flow out of the hole---and withdraw the drill and go away for the winter; then come back in November and drill out cores from the now-really-well-frozen water that would have risen from the hole. Basically, using the lake's water to plug their borehole and protect the lake.

So I'm not sure what this kerosene and freon business is about.

What caught my eye is this.

It was here that the coldest temperature ever found on Earth -- minus 89.2 Celsius (minus 128.6 Fahrenheit) -- was recorded.

That's cold enough that it starts snowing dry ice!

The borehole, pumped full of Kerosene and Freon to keep it from freezing shut, hangs poised over the pristine lake.

That is all.

I love the last few sentences:

"I feel very excited but once we do it there is no going back," Alexei Ekaikin, a scientist with the expedition said from Vostok Station. "Once you touch it, it will be touched forever."

"It's minus 40 (Celsius) outside," Turkeyev said. "But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon."

love it

>There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon.

They're 5 meters away, and they didn't finish and write an article about that? This seems an unnecessary cliffhanger.

Looks like they will have to wait a year before they actually break the surface of the lake. From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok

"The researchers switched to a new thermal drill head with a clean silicon-oil fluid to drill the rest of the way.[17] Instead of drilling all the way into the water, they will stop just above it, when a sensor on the thermal drill detects free water. At that point, the drill will be stopped and extracted from the bore hole, thereby lowering the pressure beneath it and drawing water into the hole and left for quite some time to freeze, creating a plug of frozen ice in the bottom of the hole. Finally, next summer, the team would drill down again to take a sample of that ice and analyse it.[1][18]"

Nice find. That's an excellent reason, almost zero contamination that way.

So why didn't the article mention it? If anything, they go backwards: "But until we learn how to get into the system cleanly that's an issue"

Why isn't the lake frozen solid?

I would assume because its very well insulated from above and warmed by the earth's core from below, but I'm not a geologist.

It's also probably due to being under high pressure; the melting point of a substance is dependent on the pressure it is under.

Except its water which kinda defines incompressible.

Answer is thermal energy from tectonic processes. Cite: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

It doesn't matter how compressible it is, its temperature still rises from pressure. That is why ice is so slippery, pressure (from a tire, foot, or ice skate) melts a thin layer of water on the surface which acts as a lubricant (which is also why ice stops being slippery when its temperature gets low enough that normal pressures can't raise it enough to melt).

It's more complex than that:

http://lptms.u-psud.fr/membres/trizac/Ens/L3FIP/Ice.pdf

Even an extremely high pressure cannot melt ice at -25 °C, but skiing is still possible at that temperature.

great article! If you have the time read it.

You're correct, except that the heat doesn't come from the earth's core, but from its mantle and mostly its crust.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok - The average water temperature is calculated to be around −3 °C (27 °F); it remains liquid below the normal freezing point because of high pressure from the weight of the ice above it. Geothermal heat from the Earth's interior warms the bottom of the lake. The ice sheet itself insulates the lake from cold temperatures on the surface.

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