Comments on: Just Another Bug Hunt.

By: Science: Can life survive in a vacuum? The Scientific Gamer

Science: Can life survive in a vacuum? The Scientific Gamer — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 11:01:19 +0000

[...] out in more temperate environments can evolve to tolerate very high temperatures (as covered in my extremophiles post), and this is the great power of evolution: it’s a gradual, iterative process in which organisms [...]

By: hentzau

hentzau — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:37:49 +0000

You’ve bumped yourself up at least two circles of Hell with that one.

By: vivavirago

vivavirago — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:05:52 +0000

Liquid confirmation, surely? Geddit? Because if it were hard confirmation, it would be ice!

I’ll be leaving now.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:50:24 +0000

Yeah, the increase in pressure with the depth of the ice sheet is predictable to the point where you’re guaranteed to transition from ice to liquid water at a certain depth, and people had suspected this might be the case for parts of Antarctica for nearly a century. The trick was in figuring out if the ice sheet really was that thick; seismic readings suggested it was in the 60s and aircraft radar in the 70s, which was enough to induce the Soviets to start drilling in the 80s. We didn’t get hard confirmation of the actual presence of water till the 90s though.

By: vivavirago

vivavirago — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:12:26 +0000

“The ice sheet covering it is so thick that we didn’t even know for sure that there was water down there until aircraft- and space-based radar picked it up in the early 90s. ”

I was just wondering if it was predicted that there was water underneath, on the basis of the physics principles that you’ve discussed here? Presumably it wasn’t a ‘Well, you could blow me down with a feather’ moment?

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:51:40 +0000

Re: the robot – right now they have to do everything they can to preserve the Antarctic whatever because they don’t have permission from the international council that oversees the place to send in the robot. If they get it, the attitude is going to be that while they’ll try to *minimise* contamination you can’t examine a system in detail without affecting that system in some way. Either they send in the robot, or else they seal up the hole and go home. Which would be a shame.

By: aosher

aosher — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:32:29 +0000

I was going to ask that same question! I has a mental image of Lake Vostok basically exploding. Which would be exciting.

By: Smurf

Smurf — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:07:01 +0000

That’s really quite elegant. I’m not sure that sending a robot down is really continuing the idea of not contaminating the lake though.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:57:00 +0000

Well that’s the neat thing; if you relieve pressure on freezing water by knocking a hole in the top of the ice sheet, the first thing it will do once the pressure is gone is… freeze into ice, blocking the hole.

This is what the Russians are relying on for the first stage of their analysis, actually; they’ve got a 60 ton column of kerosene and freon in the drill passage to keep the drill going, but once they’ve got that out (to avoid contaminating the lake) all they have to do is wait. The pressure differential will actually break the plug of ice that’s left in the hole, allowing water to flow up and out. This water will then refreeze in the hole. They then drill down and take out some of that ice and bam, they’ve got water from the lake without ever having to disturb its contents.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:46:32 +0000

Yeah, this shit? This is exciting stuff.