The Russians held off drilling into the accreted ice for seven years, while they went through the long process of preparing a comprehensive environmental evaluation detailing their drilling plans and inviting comment, as required by the Antarctic Treaty, an environmental-protection agreement signed by nations with a presence in the Antarctic. (The treaty is unenforceable, of course; Antarctica has no army.) They also held a competition for the cleanest method for drilling into the lake. The winner was a thermal drill, which uses heated water to melt the ice, and would replace the mechanical one when the team gets close to water. The quantity of drill fluid would then be reduced, causing denser underlying water to flood upward into the borehole and freeze there, forming a plug. “It should work, if they do everything correctly,” Priscu says.
Vostok is the best-known subglacial lake and probably the largest that will ever be found, but there are plenty of others, and satellite and radar surveys keep turning up more. Recently, Siegert updated the inventory and came up with 155 lakes. “There are probably hundreds of them,” he says. “Much of the continent is unsurveyed.” In one area, so many lakes are clustered that Antarctic researchers call it the Lake District. The total amount of water in all these lakes, according to Priscu, is 10 percent of what’s in all the surface lakes of the world. Another way to look at it: The volume of water in all subglacial lakes combined would be enough to cover the entire Antarctic continent to a depth of three feet.
Since the discovery of Lake Vostok and the first explorations of its microbiology, international meetings have been held regularly so scientists can share information and make plans. The most recent meeting, organized by SALE, took place this spring in Big Sky, Montana. Ten countries participated, including, for the first time, Japan.
Valery Lukin of Russia, sporting a gray, Lenin-style goatee, brought everybody up to date on the drilling that had resumed at Vostok. “We had a very interesting season last year,” he reported. “We got 27 meters [90 feet] of new ice.” But in January this year, they suffered a setback. “Our drill jammed in the bottom of the borehole,” he said. “The cable snapped. It was a very serious problem for the Russian Antarctic Expedition.” By the time of the Big Sky meeting, however, the “drilling masters” had recovered the drill with a hook and were once again bringing up ice. Next year, they should bring up more ice, and then in 2009, “using Russian technology,” Lukin said, “we will have ice penetration to the water body.” Tapping his chest with his fingertips repeatedly, he added, “we hope, we hope.”
There seemed to be a sense among the SALE scientists that even if there is a risk of the lake’s being polluted—the new equipment hadn’t been field-tested, for instance—nothing can be done now to stop the Russian plan. “They will go,” Petit remarked during a coffee break. “They are doing what they wish. It’s not an international decision but a national one. Even with dirty hands, they want to be the first.”
While the Russians were rushing in, U.S. agencies were standing back. In Lukin’s opinion that’s because Americans realize they cannot be first to reach a subglacial lake, and, he says, “they don’t like to be second, in any activity.” Actually, the Americans were standing back out of caution. “The bugaboo holding things up has been: How clean is clean?” explains Peter T. Doran, an earth scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Doran had been invited to Big Sky to present a new National Academies of Science/National Research Council (NRC) report (pdf) setting standards for good environmental stewardship in the study of subglacial environments. Unlike space probes, which pass through sterile space, ice drills must pass through thousands of feet of glacial ice loaded with microbes before they reach their target; therefore a microbial buildup on equipment and drilling fluids is “inevitable.” Accepting imperfection, one of the NRC’s recommendations is that the number of cells added to the lake during drilling not exceed the “minimum concentration” of microbes in the glacial ice just above it.
Another NRC recommendation is that projects be multinational. “We don’t want everybody popping their own holes,” Doran says. Scientists want to explore several different lakes because they are in various settings, are of different sizes, and maybe have different ages and origins; all of this suggests each may have its own unique set of life-forms. Probably the next hole to be drilled after Vostok will be into Lake Ellsworth, a small lake in the middle of the West Antarctic ice sheet, with seven countries represented on the British-led team. “Ellsworth is easier to get into than Vostok,” Siegert says. “It’s small and comprehensible. The simpler, the better. We’ll figure it out in one season.” The team doesn’t expect to reach the lake until 2012. None of them thinks it means they have lost a race.
Some of the most unexpected findings presented at the Big Sky sessions described the dynamic effect of the water beneath Antarctica’s ice. Robin Bell, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, reported on satellite images indicating that a region of four subglacial lakes at the head of a glacier had initiated an ice stream, a fast-moving feature within an ice sheet that carries ice to the sea. The ordinary meter-or-two-a-year speed of the glacier’s flow increased roughly tenfold as it passed over the lakes. Subglacial lakes are affecting ice sheets, it seems, not just the other way around. “Water is turning out to be the grease that makes the whole system work,” Kennicutt says. “It’s an important player in many processes fundamental to Antarctica.”
Frank Pattyn, a Belgian glaciologist who jokingly wished for a removable ice lid to make lake study easier, mentioned in his presentation other evidence that lake water beneath the glacier moves—far, often, and a lot at a time. When Duncan J. Wingham and his colleagues from University College London reviewed archived satellite records, they noticed that over a period of 16 months, the surface above an unnamed subglacial lake in the center of the East Antarctic ice sheet was sinking. The researchers interpreted the sink (pdf) as the lake discharging water, which it did at a prodigious rate, equal to three-quarters the flow of the Thames River. The water from the first lake spilled into a couple of smaller ones, which themselves drained.
“It’s quite intriguing that these lakes can drain,” Pattyn says. Such sudden flows are probably common events, with feedbacks allowing for drainage “on decadal timescales.” It’s possible that the entire subglacial watershed may be regularly flushed. “At first we thought the lakes were crucibles, museums for ancient life,” Bell says. “They formed 35 million years ago and didn’t change.” Now it’s known that they are not isolated and can change rapidly. Still, any life-forms that may exist in the lakes could have spent millions of years somewhere in the watery network, enough time for them to develop, as Priscu puts it, “some interesting strains.” In other words, there may be life-forms down there that have never existed anywhere else on Earth.
On a day in early June, it started to snow at Big Sky. Several large, brave, warm-blooded organisms from the SALE meeting jumped into the outdoor hot pool and drank beer as the flakes came down. It was a (far-fetched) analogue of what they find in their professional lives engrossing and significant: pools of meltwater under the ice.