Lake Vostok is one of the largest lakes in the world. Lake Vostok was once a large surface lake in East Antarctica and is now buried under 2.5 miles of ice. Live Science reported that the lake is one of the most extreme environments on Earth.
The lake has been covered in ice for at least 15 million years, according to a Louisiana State University Biologist. According to NASA, the lake has been covered with ice for 25 million years.
Stunning photos of ice.
The subglacial Lake Vostok is located in East Antarctica. The image is from the U.S. Antarctic Program.
Below the surface.
Lake Vostok is one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, and it's close to Lake Ontario in North America. The lake is roughly 149 miles long and 50 miles wide, and hundreds of meters deep, according to Bethan Davies. The south end of the lake may be up to 1 km deep, but the northern and southwest corners are shallow.
There are some good videos for you.
A Russian pilot noticed a smooth patch of ice above a large buried lake in the 1960s. In 1993, scientists used satellite-based radar to confirm the existence of the subglacial lake.
Christner told Live Science that Lake Vostok is one of the easiest lakes to detect.
Christner said the lake's only water supply is meltwater. He said there was no evidence for the influx of water from Lake Vostok. The water in the lake may be thousands of years old, according to ice core studies. The age of the lake water is not known.
Lake Vostok's shape has been mapped with a variety of techniques. The shallow and deep parts of the lake are separated by a ridge. Popular Science reported that some scientists think the ridge could be a vent similar to the ocean floor black smokers that are known to teem with tubeworms. The lake may be in a valley like Lake Baikal in Russia.
How to explore Antarctica is related.
A 2001 review article in the journal Nature states that the temperature of the lake water is maintained by the heat from the Earth. According to World Atlas, the lake's melting point is changed by the weight of the overlying ice.
An artist's cross-section of Lake Vostok.
There is life in the lake.
Christner was part of an international team that discovered accretion ice in the 1990s. The top half-inch of the lake's surface is covered in ice.
Live Science previously reported that analysis of the life forms suggests that Lake Vostok may have a unique ecology based on chemicals in rocks, living in isolation for hundreds of thousands of years. The types of organisms we found suggested they derived their energy from minerals in the lake and the underlying bedrock.
Live Science previously reported that snippets of DNA from a wide variety of organisms were found in Vostok's accretion ice. Jupiter's icy moon Europa could be a model for life on other moons and planets.
Alien life of theAntarctic
The paper, led by Scott Rogers, a professor of biological sciences at Bowling Green State University, discussed the thousands of species they identified in Lake Vostok.
The researchers took samples from the southern main basin and the southwestern end of the lake.
Rogers said in a press release that the team discovered far more complexity than they thought by using the samples of accretion ice.
He said that it shows how organisms can survive in places where we thought nothing could survive.
The researchers identified thousands of different types ofbacteria, including some that are found in fish, crustaceans and annelid worms, according to the press release.
An abandoned Russian station on top of Lake Vostok can be seen using a RADARSAT dataset. It is in the left part of the lake. The image is from NASA.
They discovered organisms that live in extreme cold and heat, which suggests that there is a volcano in the lake.
Rogers said that many of the species they have mapped are what they would expect to find in a lake. Most of the organisms seem to be aquatic, and many are species that live in the ocean or lake.
The presence of both marine and freshwater species supports the idea that the lake once connected to the ocean and that the freshwater was supplied by the glacier. The most biological activity was found in the embayment.
After two years of analysis, the team found that Vostok Lake contains a diverse set of organisms. Rogers emphasizes that the team made a mistake on the conservative side. They chose to only include the genetic sequence that they were certain came from the ice accretion. Rogers thinks there are a lot of other organisms in the lake, which will allow further research.
A cross-section of Lake Vostok shows how ice accumulates above the lake, as well as a list of organisms discovered in the ice core. The image is from the journal PLOS ONE.
There are additional resources.
Live Science's Guide to Antarctica provides a map of notable places such as research stations, glaciers, explorations and more.
Bethan Davies is a glacier scientist. An animation of subglacial lake behavior is included on the page.
You can learn about what would happen if you fell into Lake Vostok in this video.
Additional reporting by a Live Science contributor.
The article was updated on December 20, 2021.
Live Science published the original article.
