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Lake Vostok Reached

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1–10 of 34 posts

Re: Lake Vostok Reached

#3
It'll be exciting to find out what life forms are hiding down there, but by cracking the seal, we've already changed that ecosystem. Pumping hundreds of litres of kerosene into the ice was probably not the best way to introduce ourselves.

Re: Lake Vostok Reached

#4
post #3

It'll be exciting to find out what life forms are hiding down there, but by cracking the seal, we've already changed that ecosystem. Pumping hundreds of litres of kerosene into the ice was probably not the best way to introduce ourselves.

Did you not read the article? They didn't pump any kerosene into the lake. They switched to Freon well before reaching the lake and it sounds like all (or most) of the Freon used was forced up and out of the bore hole by the pressurized water from the lake rushing up and out.

Re: Lake Vostok Reached

#5
Russian Minister of Natural Resources Yury Trutnev and head of Russia’s Meteorological service Rosgidromet, Alexander Frolov, arrived at Russia’s Vostok station.

What is Minister of Natural resources doing there? Could it have something to do with the scramble for natural resources under Artic?

Re: Lake Vostok Reached

#8
post #6

why didn't they use a some sort of steam probe? Or heated probe?

A cubic meter of water is 1 metric ton. Assuming the ice is half that dense (from being compressed under all the other ice), it would take about 150 megajoules of heat to melt each cubic meter of ice. And that's just for the phase change - that doesn't include warming the ice up to 0C first.

Re: Lake Vostok Reached

#9
post #5

Russian Minister of Natural Resources Yury Trutnev and head of Russia’s Meteorological service Rosgidromet, Alexander Frolov, arrived at Russia’s Vostok station. What is Minister of Natural resources doing there? Could it have something to do with the scramble for natural resources under Artic?

It's Antarctica and it's protected by international treaty. Not sure why Russia were even allowed to do this.

Re: Lake Vostok Reached

#10
post #3

It'll be exciting to find out what life forms are hiding down there, but by cracking the seal, we've already changed that ecosystem. Pumping hundreds of litres of kerosene into the ice was probably not the best way to introduce ourselves.

It think it's funny that the liquid water at the bottom is treated as precious, but no one cares about the huge amount solid "water" above it.
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