Lake Vostok Essay

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Discovery What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on. – Jacques Yves Cousteau. Never before has Cousteau been so right. Until recently, it seemed humanity had discovered all it could about its habitat. However in 1996, when European ERS-1 satellite focused on the Antarctic shelf, it depicted Lake Vostok, a subglacial lake the size of Lake Ontario, completely isolated by a two mile sheet of ice for at least 14 million years.(Edwards, 2011) Theories of liquid bodies of water under Antarctica have been made as early as the late eighteen-hundreds. The existence of Lake Vostok itself has been known of since the 1970’s. (Morton, 2004) However, it is only recently …show more content…

Geologist Robin Bell dates Lake Vostok to be around thirty-million years old, basing her information on “the time it takes for other rift lakes to form,” Lake Vostok itself being a rift lake. (Bell & Priscu, 2000) Bell goes on to state that there was a drastic cooling of the Earth around fifteen million years ago, and Lake Vostok, being very close the tallest highlands in east Antarctica, would have frozen very quickly. With such a quick change in environment, an uneven mixing of chemicals and gasses occurred, so even with tremendous pressure and oxygen levels being much higher than normal, such a poor and uneven mix could provide areas in Lake Vostok where microbial life could live and reproduce for an indefinite amount of time. (Ekaykin & Lipenkov, 2010) Circumstances such as these, though very rare, are not impossible, and are present not solely on Earth …show more content…

No air, no sunlight, high oxygen concentration, and pressure 360 times that at sea level would be conditions for some very strange life indeed. (Studinger, 2008) Yet, not only is there a fascination with what life exists but what life had existed. Being sealed off from the rest of the world for 14 million years would effectively neutralize external factors such as changing climate and dominant species from influencing any existing life. Such isolation would provide a very pristine photograph of what life existed all those years ago, giving us a crucial link to what could be some of the earliest forms of life on Earth: our very first ancestors and template for our own genetic make-up. (Bell &Priscu,

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