Lake Vostok Reached | Hacker News Reader

Lake Vostok Reached

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81 pointshuhtenberg33 comments

I can't believe all the comments on this are so mundane, each time I hear news about Lake Vostok, I waste 10-15mins daydreaming about the different, totally believable (compared to some of the stuff we're seeing, e.g. Inception) screenplays one can conjure.

1) Government conspiracy theory: There are rumors that Nazis had a secret base in the Arctic near Lake Vostok (http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/world-war-ii-rum...). This one cuts between today and 1945 when two German submarines were seen in Argentina. Then, US had Operation Highjump (Operation Highjump) and, later in 1958 a few nuclear tests. And now the Russians are so anxious to get to the Lake. Why the focus on this area? It is revealed that ...

2) SF Aliens: The probe sent to Vostok inadvertently triggers and alien auto-surveillance device that is protecting a ship that crashed into Antarctica millions of years ago. After considerable loss of life, the ship is reached and the aliens are rejuvenated with terrible results. Difference between this and The Thing would be the awesome underwater shots.

3) Magical Aliens: Three words: Mountains of Madness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_of_madness). People laughed at Lovecraft but maybe he was much more well-informed than we assumed. The mountains mentioned are, of course, real: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/photogalleri.... The Russian expedition is all fun and games until a weird guy (who double majored in ancient languages) points out that in the extinct Omaguaca language of Argentina the area around Vostok is called "Raulya", which is evidently where Cthulhu is sleeping. The greedy Russians wake him up (similar to what happened in Moria) and chaos ensues.

I would be leaning toward a mixture of (3) and (1).

Believe it or not, there's a novel that combines pretty much all these things: Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives." If you're into sci-fi, you need to check this out. It's a bizarre but hilarious mashup of James Bond, Slashdot, Office Space, and H. P. Lovecraft.

I would actually recommend A Colder War, which actually mentions a subterranean lake, and is also available to read online for free: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

The combination of 1 and 3 can be found in 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy'[1]. Lake Vostok isn't involved in the story, but there is a portion based on the same rumors of the Nazi secret base. The current time period is set about 40 years ago.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

As to #3, I'm afraid someone has beaten you: http://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/420/

Stargate Atlantis (plus an episode in Stargate SG-1) touches on #2 and #3.

> There are rumors that Nazis had a secret base

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky

"People laughed at Lovecraft"

Really?

Ok, admit it, #2 is simply Alien vs Predator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_vs._Predator_(film)#Plot)

Russian Minister of Natural Resources Yury Trutnev and head of Russia’s Meteorological service Rosgidromet, Alexander Frolov, arrived at Russia’s Vostok station.

What is Minister of Natural resources doing there? Could it have something to do with the scramble for natural resources under Artic?

It's Antarctica and it's protected by international treaty. Not sure why Russia were even allowed to do this.

It's a scientific mission, which is expressly protected by the treaty.

he's a politician, and his government has done something that's getting positive press. he's just jumping in front of a camera.

also: Antarctic, not Arctic.

Eh Lake Vostok is in Antarctic but oil is under Arctic

It'll be exciting to find out what life forms are hiding down there, but by cracking the seal, we've already changed that ecosystem. Pumping hundreds of litres of kerosene into the ice was probably not the best way to introduce ourselves.

Did you not read the article? They didn't pump any kerosene into the lake. They switched to Freon well before reaching the lake and it sounds like all (or most) of the Freon used was forced up and out of the bore hole by the pressurized water from the lake rushing up and out.

I did read the article, but it's simply wishful thinking to believe that all toxic substances could be flushed from a 3,800m deep hole. They say 1.5 cubic meters of lubricants and antifreeze came to the surface. Where did the rest go?

There's no evidence that there is any more. They only need the lubricant at the point of contact with the drill bit.

If this was anything like a typical process, drilling fluid would be pumped under pressure down the drill pipe. Not a few drops - rather hundreds (or thousands) of liters. Obviously, this is not hard-rock drilling so I'd assume the volume of drilling fluid would be reduced. It would still have to be a substantial amount, definitely more that 1.5 cubic meters.

So now that the drilling hole is flushed of antifreeze and its filled with prehistoric lake water... what's to stop it from freezing and closing off the hole again?

It is not much like a typical drilling process. The article includes a pretty decent infographic abt 2/3 way down, which shows the drilling principle on the last slide. Worth a look.

> They say 1.5 cubic meters of lubricants and antifreeze came to the surface. Where did the rest go?

The lake water, which is under pressure from the ice, forced 1.5 cubic meters out of the top of the hole. The rest of the four kilometer high column of lubricants and antifreeze is still in the hole.

It think it's funny that the liquid water at the bottom is treated as precious, but no one cares about the huge amount solid "water" above it.

liquid water could harbour life. the icepack probably doesn't have too much living in it.

We've found microbes almost everywhere, and they make up the vast, vast majority of life on this planet.

In Lake Vostok's case, the first reports were in 1999,[1] and yeast and fungi have been isolatef from ice cores collected at depths more than 3500 m below the surface.[2] Exciting stuff, no?

*: Posting from school, so sorry if these aren't free.

[1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5447/2144.short

[2]: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1728/474....

why didn't they use a some sort of steam probe? Or heated probe?

they claim that they could not generate the electricity needed for those.

A cubic meter of water is 1 metric ton. Assuming the ice is half that dense (from being compressed under all the other ice), it would take about 150 megajoules of heat to melt each cubic meter of ice. And that's just for the phase change - that doesn't include warming the ice up to 0C first.

I wonder how they would plan to do the same thing on Europa? I read about a nuclear-powered cryobot somewhere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryobot

Sure, if you've got the power for it, there's a lot to be said for a drill with no moving parts!

If you need to warm it up depends on the depth - at the bottom the ice is not much colder than 0°C due to geothermal flux. So if, say, you only used the hot water method for the lowest part, the amount of heat for warming can easily be neglected.

If you need to warm it up depends on the depth - at the bottom the ice is not much colder than 0°C due to geothermal flux. (That's why the lake is there too.) So if, say, you only used the hot water method for the lowest part, the amount of heat for warming can easily be neglected.

I've been looking forward to this excitedly for some time now. But now, maybe, I'm not so sure.

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