fark took 20 years to drill to the water
www.heraldsun.com.au/nocookies?a=A.flavipesIT'S been 20 million years since it saw the light of day.
And it's taken 20 years for Russian scientists to pierce the 3800-odd metres of ice sitting on top of it.
Meet Lake Vostok, the world's third-largest lake by volume, where the Russian team yesterday finally touched its surface.
Now the interesting bit begins - what will they find there?
The world's scienctific community is holding out for never-seen-before microbial life forms, provided they haven't been killed by the 60 tonnes of freon and kerosene used in the drilling technique.
More about that later, because the rest of us are pulling for alien life forms and Nazi secrets.
Let's go with the alien theory first.
Because sub-glacial lakes are extreme environments, the hope is that samples will show whether life could exist in water suspected to lie beneath the frozen surface of Mars, the Saturnian moon of Enceladus and Jupiter's satellite, Europa.
If so, it's a huge breakthrough for the world's various space agencies trying to convince governments that trips to the outer limits of our solar system are worth stumping up for.
But when it comes to unique DNA, Russian news agency RIA Novosti has its hopes pinned on something more controversial.
They're hoping further exploration near where yesterday's breakthrough was made may uncover a cache of Hitler's archives.
RIA cites German admiral Karl Donitz, who in 1943 claimed "Germany's submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Fuehrer on the other end of the world".
It says just before the Nazis surrendered in 1945, they started building an ice cave at Lake Vostok in which to house "several boxes of relics from the Third Reich, including Hitler's secret files".
And not just files. Another claim is that a U-977 submarine delivered the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun in the hope their DNA could one day be cloned.
All of which may be getting away from the point of the experiment and the controversy surrounding it, namely, should we be going there in the first place?
Professor Martin Siegert, head of the school of geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, said concerns about ruining an environment possibly untouched for 20 million years marred "a milestone ... a major achievement".
"It's very difficult for them to convince (others) that their experiment is going to be clean, when you have essentially two miles of kerosene to cross before you get to the lake surface."
Jean Jouzel, a scientist at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), said he had "reservations" about the Vostok project and dismissed claims from Russia that the breakthrough would also give insights into climate change through ancient bubbles of carbon dioxide (CO2) stored in the ice.
Deep coring of Antarctic ice has already provided historical data on stored CO2.
"From a technological point of view, the drilling is a genuine feat. But from the scientific point of view I don't think it will lead to big discoveries," he said.
"It could cause pollution, which the Russians think would be temporary and minor, but this argument has still to be proved," he said.
- with AFP
