A lake sits under four kilometres of ice
Lake Vostok, in East Antarctica, is a liquid freshwater lake about 250 kilometres long, sealed under roughly four kilometres of ice.
Established2 min read
Seismic shots and ice-penetrating radar found a flat, bright reflector beneath the Russian station at Vostok. Drilling later reached the lake's boundary. The water stays liquid because the ice above is a blanket, because the rock below leaks a little heat, and because pressure lowers the melting point.
Vostok is the largest of hundreds of subglacial lakes. It has been isolated, or nearly so, for a very long time. That makes it interesting to biologists and dangerous to drill: a dirty borehole would be a permanent visitor.
Caveats
- Claims of unusual life in the accretion ice have been disputed. Contamination is hard to rule out.
- The lake is fresh, not a buried ocean of brine, though other subglacial waters are salty.
Sources
- 1Kapitsa A. P. et al.. A large deep freshwater lake beneath the ice of central East Antarctica. Nature 381, 1996.