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After 20 million years below the Antarctic ice, Lake Vostok will finally reveal its secrets
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After 20 million years below the Antarctic ice, Lake Vostok will finally reveal its secrets
At the bottom of the Earth, two miles below Antarctica’s ice sheet, scientists have broken a 20-million-year silence. A Russian team has drilled 3,770 metres (2.3 miles) through the polar ice to a vast freshwater lake, called Lake Vostok. It has lain undisturbed for four times as long as human beings have been separate from apes.
It has taken the team 22 years to drill through, and the day after they achieved their goal they had to leave, before the brief Antarctic summer came to an end and the air became too cold for aeroplanes to fly. So it will not be until December that any frozen samples can be retrieved, and not until the end of next year that liquid water from the vast lake, as large as Lake Ontario, will be examined.
May 29th, 2012
[link to blogs.telegraph.co.uk]
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