Drilling Begins At Lake Hidden Beneath Antarctic

New submitter stonetony writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "A team of 12 scientists and engineers has begun work at remote Lake Ellsworth. They are using a high-pressure hose and sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through more than two miles of ice. The aim is to analyse ice waters isolated for up to 500,000 years. The team of 12 scientists and engineers is using sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through the ice to waters isolated for up to half a million years. The process of opening a bore-hole is expected to last five days and will be followed by a rapid sampling operation before the ice refreezes."

How are they doing this...

[msauve]

Is there any chance that they're using sterile water heated to almost the boiling point to melt a passage through ice to get to water isolated for up to 5e5 years?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

i would say there is a good chance that they're using sterile water heated to almost the boiling point to melt a passage through ice to get to water isolated for up to 5e5 years

Re:How are they doing this...

[Ambiguous Coward]

You're all missing the point that they're using water near 100C to bore through ice to get at water that's been isolated for as much as 500 millennia.

Re:

[enoz]

Three times is poetry.

Re:

[Fluffeh]

The DoRD Department of Redundacy Department does not do poetry. Please continue.

Re:

[Dragon Bait]

The DoRD Department of Redundacy Department does not do poetry. Please continue.

Actually they do. But it's Vogon poetry.

Title arriving:

[smittyoneeach]

"Ode to a Small Lump of Greenish Water that Turned to into Putty I Found in my Antarctic Pit That I Reached Using Slightly Sub-Gaseous Phase Water One Midsummer Morning, Which Turned Out to be Cthulhu's Placenta, There in His R'lyeh Prison, Turning What was Going to be my Nobel Prize Science Project into a Sudden Descent into Eldricht Helllllllllllaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahah theMayansDidIttheMayansDidIttheMayansDidIttheMayansDidIt!!!!!!!! "

Re:

[AaronLS]

Agree, I would have hoped they would have used "sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through" one more time. Maybe even spelling it sterilized that last time just to see if people are on their toes.

Re:

[madprof]

This is too funny.

Re:

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Its funny until a group of humorless Slashdot readers will mod it down and state the obvious. LOL, read down the list, its already been done.

Re:How are they doing this...

[Ambiguous Coward]

Let it be known that I was actually moderated "-1 Redundant" on this. The irony is palpable.

Re:

[TheLink]

The moderators screwed up. Should be +5 redundant.

Re:

[Ambiguous Coward]

Ahh you missed it. Near.

Re:How are they doing this...

[muon-catalyzed]

sterile or not, isolated for 500,000 years.., now is the time to open Pandora's ice box, 21.12.2012 is approaching.

/s

Re:

[Redmancometh]

Fuck! You beat me to it. Take heed and bear witness to the plague these men shall unleash upon humanity!!!! Then the draconoids of niburu shall plunder our resources an rape those still alive! Or just some really fucking cool discoveries. Categorically unique fucking cool discoveries...my pants are getting tight.

Re:

[avandesande]

More importantly, it has been isolated for the amount of time it takes light to travel 500,000 light years.

Re:

[Stuarticus]

I thought that took zero time, from the perspective of the light.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

sterile or not, isolated for 500,000 years.., now is the time to open Pandora's ice box, 21.12.2012 is approaching. /s

The good news is they found cold beer.

The bad news is they also found a black hole that sucked away any chances of it turning into a full-blown kegger.

Pandora. Talk about the anti-party. What a bitch.

Re:

[crutchy]

maybe they're using alcohol to sterilize the water... bring on the kegger!

Temp?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the summary I understand they are using water to bore the hole. I didn't see the temperature of the water that is being used. Shouldn't they also use sterile water to prevent contamination?

Re:

[msauve]

If, unlike the typical /.er, you took the time to actually read the article and not just the summary, you would know that it takes 12 people to do this sort of thing.

Re:

[crutchy]

not quite as many as required to change a light bulb though... especially in antarctica

Re:How are they doing this...

[Twigmon]

Indeed, however, this is a dupe of this post: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/12/13/2126234/drilling-begins-at-lake-hidden-beneath-antarctic [slashdot.org]

Re:

[Psicopatico]

This story brings the concept of dupe to a whole new level!
For your convenience, a copy of the story is injected inside the story, so you don't have to remember where you've already read it and neither have to click on another link (a real boon for the lazy).

Yo dawg and all the rest applies.

Re:

[RMingin]

I sincerely doubt that they are using sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through the ice to waters isolated for up to half a million years.

Questions from the summary

[orson_of_fort_worth]

The summary wasn't clear so my questions are: Is the water sterilized? How hot is the water in the hose? How long has the lake water been isolated? Also, Is the water sterilized? How hot is the water in the hose? How long has the lake water been isolated?

Re:

[Janek Kozicki]

ok, you beat me there.

Re:

[Ambiguous Coward]

1) 12
2) A dozen

Re:Questions from the summary

[Ambiguous Coward]

1) Yes
2) Almost boiling!
3) 500,000 years
4) Indeed
5) Nearly 100 degrees celsius
6) 500 millennia

Re:

[Janek Kozicki]

you don't need your pills. Now that summary repeats itself, you are all safe.

Great summary

[Janek Kozicki]

I dodn't even need to red it twice to see that a team of scientists is using is sterilised water at near boiling point.

Indeed; using sterilised water at near boiling point.

Re:

[Janek Kozicki]

btw, I am taking my part on voting http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org]

So I wonder how those submissions make it through. Maybe you (editors) need a little higher threshold for acceptance?

Stargate

[Lanforod]

Great. Finally going to find a Stargate. Abydos here we come...

Re:

[Kierthos]

Nah. The fools will end up releasing some shoggoths.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Now we know...

[Local ID10T]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

You took the words right out of my mouth!

Now we know what the Mayans were predicting:
  The scientists wake Cthulhu, R'lyeh rises, and the world ends.

Re:

[Rockoon]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Come on, the summary already said it twice!

Re:

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

"In his house at R'lyeh, using sterilized water at near boiling point, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

Re:

[crutchy]

the mouth of the parasite xeno looks like a vagina... antarctica here i come :)

Re:

[netwarerip]

You should be fine, real vaginas have more teeth. Or so I have been told.

Mayans

[smitsco]

The first results are going to be available next week. Hmmm. December 21st maybe.

How did the Mayans know someone would drill through two miles of ice to release something that will destroy the world?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

How are they going to drill through 2 miles of ice. That's one heck of a drill bit. That drill bit would have to be almost 2 miles long. That would be a nearly 2 mile long drill bit.
Captcha = informed

Re:Mayans

[AaronLS]

Maybe it's not a drill bit at all, but some sort of really hot water. I'm not really sure though.

Re:

[crutchy]

close to boiling even?

Story by Lovecraft ?

[morcego]

Mountains of Madness, anyway ?

Re:

[GameboyRMH]

Thought the same thing. Of course Prometheus is also applicable and the AvP jokes are already coming up.

Re:

[morcego]

Prometheus ? No, that never happened. Just like there are only 3 Starwars movies, and only 1 Highlander.

Summary goof was intentional

[Ambiguous Coward]

It was written that way to catch people who only read half the summary. It's simple math: 2 * 50% = 100%! Foolproof.

Re:

[bloodhawk]

Your lack of faith in the quality of our fools is disturbing as is your naivety in believing they read as much as half the summary.

Re:

[crutchy]

no... i am your father

Oh no....

[3seas]

they is gonna sterilize the lake, contaminating it with sterilized water....

In other news more rain forest are being destroyed to build condos.....

Re:

[crutchy]

i live near a bunch of power stations, which use highly sterilized and purified water to turn to superheated steam to drive the turbines, except that if you drank such water it would strip all the nutrients out of your body and kill you.... purified and sterilized water isn't always as good as it seems (it may well kill any microorganisms the scientists are trying to discover and study)

Re:

[hawkinspeter]

You'd have to drink a lot of purified water for it to kill you.

Re:

[hawkinspeter]

Has there been any tests done on this? I'm doubtful that 6-7 litres would be able to kill someone.

Re:

[mcgrew]

if you drank such water it would strip all the nutrients out of your body and kill you

Do you have a credible link to that obvious bullshit [wikipedia.org] statement? I've seen it before, but it makes absolutely no sense at all. [thenakedscientists.com]

They're using sterilized water so as not to pollute the lake itself with organisms or minerals.

My old man always told me "don't believe nothin' you hear and only half of what you see." You should follow that advice; whoever told you distilled water would strip the nutrients out of your body and kill

Re:

[Palamos]

That was a very interesting use of the double negative by your old man!

Re:

[crutchy]

i didn't say distilled water dipshit... i said purified water (almost 100% pure)

Re:

[crutchy]

funny the person who told me that purified (i never mentioned distilled) water can kill you works in a power station chem lab... i guess you must be the usual armchair expert though... so if you never seen a power station you wouldn't beleive they exist either? what about electrons? bet you never seen those.... pffft what a fuckass

Re:

[crutchy]

They're using sterilized water so as not to pollute the lake itself with organisms or minerals.

You don't seem to know much about how a power station works (not surprising by the rest of your rant).

There are two types of water used in a power station; for cooling and for steam, and the two are physically isolated.
Cooling water comes from lakes or rivers, is used in heat exchangers to turn low pressure steam (isolated in pipes) back into water.
Most of the water used for steam is recirculated, so it doesn't end up in any lakes anyway.
The plumes of steam that you see coming out of cooling tower

Re:

[crutchy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_purification#Demineralized_water [wikipedia.org]

They call it demineralized water at the power stations. Distillation is most likely part of the process, but there are all sorts of chemicals involved too (acids and whatnot).

DUPE

[Tastecicles]

I posted a submission on this story a WEEK AGO.

Re:

[AaronLS]

Yours probably didn't clarify with enough clarity the clearness that this article clearly has.

But I feel your pain.

Re:

[Tastecicles]

sorry, it was Tuesday [slashdot.org]. Feels like a week tho.

Re:

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Lesson is: add more tautology and outright repetition and Bob's your uncle. And don't forget to repeat things.

Re:

[GameboyRMH]

After reading the summary my first thought was "I'm never putting too much effort into my submission summaries again."

Re:

[AaronLS]

Yes, if the lake is actually filled with millions of giant underwater ice spiders, and 0.1% of them have a genetic variation that makes them resistant to sterilized boiling water, then that 0.1% can survive the trip to the surface. Thus creating a dual resistance super bug(literally, or you might technically say spiders are not bug, meh).

Re:

[crutchy]

you're obviously talking about a xenomorph

...and ripley isn't even born yet... we're so fucked

Re:

[Stuarticus]

And I was hoping for a stand up fight.

We all know it

[StankAsPoe]

Cthulhu or Elder Ones.

Re:

[Macrat]

Remember the location.

It is more likely to be The Thing.

Cthulhu - Just in time

[7bit]

Awesome. Awakening Cthulhu from its icy slumber right on schedule!

Should give it just enough time to consume all our souls by midnight 12/21/2012 after it's awakening and release. Wait.. This drilling project wasn't funded by a kickstarter project was it?

Re:Cthulhu - Just in time

[AaronLS]

If not, someone should perhaps start some projects like this, such that doomsday cults funnel their money into useful research projects. Win-win for everyone, unless the cult turns out to be right.

Re:

[AaronLS]

Just to clarify, the second win is because the cult used their money for something useful, and has less money left to do silly things with, such as buying Nike's, barbiturates, and Vodka.

I love you guys

[Esion Modnar]

You're just as sarcastic and snarky as I am. Merry Christmas, y'all!

Redux?

[courcoul]

Hadn't the Russians done this already, on their side of Antartica?

Or is this a different subglacial lake?

Re:

[gagol]

Russians did it at lake Vostok.

Re:Redux?

[dargaud]

Well, technically the russians haven't quite breached the lake. It's ongoing right now and here's what I've followed so far:
The layer of ice just above the lake is refrozen water (and not compressed snow from above). They already analyzed that without finding anything significant (a US lab found lots of stuff but the word is that it's all contaminated DNA, a french lab found only one candidate piece of DNA, that ice is 10 times cleaner than the cleanest water we can make in a lab).
So a few days ago the russians breached the last remaining ice after using a sterilized drill. They then withdrew the drill and immediately lowered the pressure of the drilling fluid, allowing the water of the lake to raise into the hole for 600 meters. This water froze quickly. Now they are drilling again this freshly frozen ice which will be analyzed in a special very clean lab. I just don't know how they can drill again 600m of ice without deviating more than 10cm (the diameter of the core).
Official results should start coming in about a month.

Re:

[courcoul]

BTW, this Russian effort has to be admired for its persistence. They've been patiently going at it when money and weather permits on Antartic summers since 20 years ago or more.

Re:

[dargaud]

They've been drilling more or less inside the same hole (there are a few deviations due to stuck drills) since 1959 with a bunch of years off for lack of funding.

Re:

[wiedzmin]

that ice is 10 times cleaner than the cleanest water we can make in a lab)

So... if we combine pure hydrogen and pure oxygen to create water in the lab... that ice is 10 times cleaner than that, eh? Right on, right on.

Re:

[dargaud]

Yes, because you can't do what you just said. Water has the (un)fortunate effect of reacting with almost anything it gets in contact with: CO2, metals, viruses suspended in air, deposits on glass surface even after they've been cleaned with acid and liquid O2, etc... and absorbing it. The water in the lake is purer because the only thing it comes in contact with is pure ice (and there's probably some segregation process going on inside). Anyway I was at a conference with the guys who are trying to analyze t

ahhhhh

[wbr1]

Release the kracken..... release the kraken

oblig

[kid_wonder]

in soviet russia the summary repeats the summary ..

oh wait a seco...

Re:

[crutchy]

could be a multi-stage rocket engineer

NOOOooo!!

[kenp2002]

I saw John Carpenter's "The Thing" and we all know how this will end with a half-assed prequel!!

The Waters of Mar--err, Antarctica!

[Keiran Halcyon]

As long as the Arctic Expedition commander isn't an ancestor of Adelaide Brooke, we should be fine. If that turns out to be the case, better hope the TARDIS shows up. Either way, just to be safe, nobody drinks the water or runs irrigation with it. K?

5 days you say?

[wiedzmin]

Well then, I guess I've figured out why the world will end on December 21st...

What's the point?

[zivan56]

Just wait a few years and let nature do it for you....

Re:

[crutchy]

say again i missed that... i missed that...

Re:

[crutchy]

its antarctica... the land of 12 people rocking up and thinking they're going to make a big hole and do something awesome and eventually not doing much except trying to survive the most hostile environment on earth until a boat comes and takes them home or they die

Re:

[Malizar]

Don't worry, I am sure it will be a SyFy movie at some point, it depends on what their random plot dice come up with.