Hidden Truths Of Lake Vostok Excite Scientists And Ranters
Bryon Okada Fort
Worth Star-Telegram From The National Post
6-26-1
A subglacial lake discovered four kilometres below the South
Pole has captured the imaginations not only of scientists but
also of conspiracy theorists and alien-encounter types.
NASA wants to use Lake Vostok to test equipment for a mission
to Jupiter. Microbiologists want to study life in extreme climates.
Environmentalists halted exploration to keep the lake, believed to
have the purest freshwater on Earth, free of contaminants. But
when the drilling stopped the speculation intensified, particularly
via the Internet, that scientists were about to expose the world to
a deadly virus for which humans have no antibodies.
And when several researchers became sick this year, requiring
airlifts out of Antarctica, the cries of a government coverup
reached a fever pitch.
Now some, inspired by the release of the movie Atlantis: The
Lost Empire, believe Lake Vostok provides evidence that the lost
city lies under the South Pole, a victim of polar shifting and/or
plate tectonics.
Here is an excerpt of a popular posting in several Internet chat
rooms:
"If the Great Flood was caused by the Earth shifting its axis, as
appears to be what actually happened, where what used to be
the North Pole ended up near the equator, then Atlantis didn't
sink. It simply relocated to the South Pole."
To put it simply, Lake Vostok is cool.
For those unfamiliar with the story, a lot of hard science has
gone into the exploration of Lake Vostok.
The Russians have had a base at the site since the 1950s, but it
was not until two decades later that scientists suspected there
was something beneath it. Since 1989, scientists and engineers
have been drilling the ice sheet above Lake Vostok to study the
Earth's past climates. Drilling was abruptly halted when
researchers hit a layer of refrozen ice 120 metres thick.
That led to speculation, later confirmed, that more than 3,600
metres below the base, there is a 23,000 square kilometre
subglacial lake, roughly the size of Lake Ontario. The water is
unusually warm, probably a little below 0C, compared with -55C
at the surface.
U.S. scientists studied the refrozen samples and found bacteria,
which could suggest that a whole ecosystem different from ours
-- an alternate ecology -- may have existed for thousands, maybe
millions, of years.
"That's what we know and it's not much," said John Priscu, a
Montana State University microbial ecology professor who
conducted the study.
"We know there's life down there, and it's a bizarre environment
under three miles of ice, and it's been there a long time. That's
pretty wild."
Mr. Priscu is leading another study this summer, so the picture
should become clearer in the next year or so.
The unanswered questions, along with the remoteness of
Antarctica and the hazy politics of that faraway continent, have
increased the already intense speculation.
The Atlantis Blueprint, by Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath,
proposes that the people of Atlantis had created a thriving
maritime society that is the proto-culture of societies today.
The basis of Mr. Flem-Ath's research is an ancient map
depicting Atlantis that he found in a book while doing research
for a screenplay about hibernating aliens.
"The map is a map of Atlantis, but if you take off all the labels,
and you compare it to the Earth's surface, it's very similar to
Antarctica," he said. "That was the first thing that got me on to it."
His work has often been used to promote Lake Vostok theories,
but his research locates the main city of Atlantis elsewhere.
The speculation about the lake does not surprise Ray Browne,
founder of the Popular Culture Association and professor
emeritus at Bowling Green State
University in Ohio, the United States's only department devoted
to studying the reality-in-flux of coolness.
"When there's an interest, you've got to feed that," Mr. Browne
said.
"Someone has rediscovered Atlantis outside the Pillars of
Hercules, inside the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean, under the
South Pole and everywhere else ...
"They want to find it, we want to find it, and if we never do, it's still
tremendously interesting, because we all have a little
archaeologist in us, and we're yearning for the Garden of Eden."