Russian team reaches isolated Antarctic lake

Nature : Lake Vostok, the largest of more than 140 subglacial lakes buried under the surface of Antarctica, has been breached by the Russian Antarctic research program. The almost 3800 meters of ice overlying the lake give a continuous paleoclimatic record of the past 400 000 years. The Vostok drilling project was initially begun in the 1990s and used ice cores to examine ancient climatic conditions. The Russian team has taken some samples, but they are most likely from a pocket of water just above the lake; previous samples taken from ice on the bottom of the glacier, made from frozen lake water, contained cells, but it’s not known whether those samples were contaminated. The team won’t be able to extract frozen samples from the lake until December of this year, and in 2013–14, the scientists will take unfrozen water samples using numerous probes that will measure temperature, acidity, and organic compounds in the water; the probes will be packaged to prevent sample contamination.