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Uncategorized Friday, October 19th 2012 at 5:26 pm

Lake Vostok Devoid Of Microbes, Bad News For Prospect Of Life Elsewhere In Solar System

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Earlier this year, a team of Russian-led engineers and researchers drilled a hole into the Earth, breaking into Lake Vostok, a liquid water lake sealed beneath the ice of Antarctica for nearly 15 million years. They were looking for signs of life in the lake — microbes that might offer clues to what sort of creatures we could expect to run into on icy moons elsewhere in the solar system, like Saturn’s satellite Europa. This week, the first analyses of water samples from the lake are in, and they’re pretty disheartening. Lake Vostok appears to be devoid of microbial life.

For people who were hoping that Vostok would prove an example of life triumphing over adversity and thriving in the most seemingly desolate and unforgiving environments, that’s a major letdown. If you were hoping that finding life in Vostok would light a fire under space agencies to start looking for life in similar environments that we can reach in the solar system, it’s an even bigger one, as this is not the sort of result that drives investment in exploration. After all, no one wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to send a robot to drill a hole in an icy moon just to find out it is full of cold water. We could be blowing people up with that taxpayer money!

This certainly isn’t game over for the idea of finding life in the long sealed lake. After all, we are literally still just skimming the surface of Lake Vostok, and there’s still the chance that microbes could be thriving toward the deep end. At least, that’s what researchers are hoping. Otherwise, they just put a Herculean effort into drilling a really, really deep hole right into the planet’s past and don’t exactly have a lot to show for it.

(via Nature)

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  • http://www.facebook.com/paul.pardee Paul Pardee

    This certainly isn’t a surprise. Based on our current (flawed) theory of evolution, you’d need to have multiple generations to adapt to the environment. And even then, the seed organisms aren’t guaranteed to adapt.

    With critters like the polar bear, they migrated up north and adapted. Those that couldn’t died, but that wasn’t the end of the original bear stock. More bears in the south could breed and more bears could go north until a population was able to survive and create a new population.

    In this case, since the environment is closed to new life, the existing organisms only really had once chance.

  • eqagunn

    Fingers crossed. Would be awesome if they actually fine some life there.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Randy-Coots/1747617716 Randy Coots

    So it looks to me like they don’t know where the geothermal source is, and its theoretically there. Any microbiological life would be in the proximity of that heat source.
    I wonder if they’ve had time to sample the soil on the bottom of the lake for remains of life that didn’t survive. That could provide some interesting information as well.
    As far as comparing to an eco system on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, I think there are some distinct differences. Such as the fact that those eco systems would have light, and probably have more geothermal activity due to the gas giant they are in proximity to. That is assuming they have liquid cores of course.

  • idlethoughts

    I believe the idea was that microorganisms may propagate through space from planet to planet. Our own stratospheric microbes are continually being flung out into space and theoretically should have the ability to survive in stasis indefinitely out there until they hit something. So if our Arctic lakes could support and be colonized by bacteria, it might stand to reason that similar places in the solar system might also be colonized by microbes either from earth or elsewhere.

    Also Micro organisms generally don’t take more than a few generations to “adapt” to a new environment due both to their high mutation rate and extreme ability to reproduce. For instance, suppose an antibiotic is given to a person infected with a bacterial decease, the antibiotic may wipe out 99.99 percent of the bacteria but the 0.01 percent, who be random mutation were immune to the antibiotic, will now rapidly reproduce and form a new population which is almost entirely immune to the antibiotic.

    As a side note, and I hesitate to ask, but what do you mean by “flawed” when referring to the theory of evolution?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=629737564 Wayne Harrison

    I wouldn’t expect any sign of life in the top layer. The lake has been undisturbed for millions of years and the sediment would have settled long ago. With geothermal vents at the bottom, I would expect the bottom sediment to be teaming with life living off the sulphur from the vents.

  • Anonymous

    I find the graphic more interesting and informative than previous graphics of Lake Vostok

  • Wilf Tarquin

    Does not make sense. It’s already known from samples of accretion ice (re-frozen
    lakewater ice) collected further up in the borehole that there’s bacteria
    and other single-celled life in the lake water. It’s utterly impossible
    that there’d be bacteria in refrozen lakewater a few meters above the
    lake surface, but none in the lake water itself.

  • Anonymous

    Europa orbits Jupiter.

  • Fut

    Can you post a link to this story?

  • http://www.facebook.com/neil.meschino Neil Meschino

    why would Enceladus or Europa have light? Their ice shells are just as thick if not thicker AND they are MUCH farther from the sun