The Great Antarctic Search For Life Is Over (For Now)

The Lake Ellsworth drilling project was supposed to be a quick, high-tech hunt for microbes under the surface of Antarctica, but tech problems forced researchers to scrap it.

By Colin Lecher Posted 12.28.2012 at 1:00 pm 9 Comments

McMurdo Dry Valleys, Home Of Lake Vida Robert Simmon, based on data provided by the NASA GSFC Oceans and Ice Branch and the Landsat 7 Science Team

The British Antarctic Survey above Lake Ellsworth was a Great White Hope for discovering never-before-seen life. Scientists spent years planning an ambitious study of the lake, which sits two miles below the Antarctic surface, hoping to burrow through the ice with a hot-water drill. If they'd arrived at the bottom, the team might've found microbes with biology never observed by humans. Instead, the team's heading home.

What happened? First, it's important to know what was supposed to happen. Scientists would open a borehole with the drill, giving them enough time to lower remote-control probes into the depths. Those probes would search for life. All of this would've taken a mere six days.

But there were complications. The drill, meant to dive straight down, leaked hot water into the ice well before its destination--just 300 meters under the surface, or about 10 percent of the way to Lake Ellsworth. A part for the drill apparently malfunctioned, too, forcing the team to fly a spare all the way out from Britain.

These were expensive missteps. in all, the project cost about 8 million pounds. When the researchers return, there will be a review that offers a more detailed look at what exactly went wrong, and the researchers might even get another shot at it. But that could mean another few years of planning and implementation.

Some other Antarctic studies are faring a little better. Earlier this month, NASA scientists, along with other researchers, dug a (relatively meager) 65 feet below the surface, uncovering microbes in Lake Vida. A Russian team reported success for its foray below the ice in February, drilling up to 800 meters into a lake that's been buried for 14 million years (though not without some controversy).

The big appeal of Ellsworth is that it might be home to even older, more isolated microbes. The older the microbes, the weirder they are--and possibly the more we can learn from them. Scientists were hoping projects like Ellsworth would provide a window to similar environments on Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus, which means it would help scientists understand how life might look on other planets.

Maybe we'll have to cut out the middleman and head to space.

[BBC]

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9 Comments

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stan0301

12/28/12 at 1:32 pm

Ever hear of "Project Mohole"?--Google it.
Stan

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rlb2

12/28/12 at 5:51 pm

This news is decades old and still stuck in the mud. It's like the nuclear fusion hype, the closer to the high temperature they got for a fusion reaction the more energy they needed to get it started. When will it all end, or stay tuned for the next episode from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show at Frostbite Falls???

Ron Bennett

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AldenSol

12/29/12 at 6:15 am

@beyond9
It's not about money being more valuable than children's lives, it's about freedom being valuable to a good life. You're not looking to restrict people making money off of something that someone, I assume you think it'll be you or someone with the same exact twisted beliefs, deems excessively violent or pervasive, you're looking to restrict the freedom of them to produce it and for me or anyone else to access it. You're looking to rob freedom away from me and any children you claim to want to protect because you somehow believe the scientifically disproven non sequitur that there is a causal relationship between entertainment media and active acts of violence among members of the society. Oh, and btw, you can look it up. Crime rates started declining rapidly twenty years ago(When video games first started becoming mainstream, fancy that.) and are at their lowest levels EVER. Explain that one.

If these things can CAUSE one to become violent and sociopathic, how exactly have you made it through the Internet to this website without watching or playing a violent video game, movie, show, or other entertainment media? Either you've never seen a violent video game, movie, or tv show, have and are now a homicidal maniac, or you've experienced these mediums miraculously unscathed from the psychological barrage and brainwashing that ensued. Please, if it's that last one, explain to us how you pulled it off because, if the threat is bad enough to warrant maiming freedom, it couldn't've just been the fact that you could tell the difference between fact and fiction and are sane. It definitely couldn't be that since most people are sane and can tell the difference between what's real and what isn't.

Beyond the fact that such inhibited freedom is disgusting and vile, I find it insulting that you think myself and other people are dumb enough and weak enough that we need your totalitarian rules to be enforced on us. I don't need a babysitter telling what I can and can't see or do. If you feel so feeble-minded that you can't keep from committing acts of violence because you saw someone get shot on tv, then you go ahead and stay away from those types of media and stay away from the general population, but leave everyone else out of it. I want no part in it.

Oh yeah, and while I do like the idea of ensuring gun owners have appropriate facilities to safely store their weapons and the idea of weapons recovery programs, any further limitations on the ownership of firearms goes against the point of the second amendment, which is that in the case of someone threatening the life of another, such as a school shooter but extending as far as our own government in the most extreme cases, as outlined by the founding fathers, citizens will have access to the means to defend themselves. If someone actually had a gun, as the second amendment allows, to protect themselves at Sandy Brook, there may have been a lot less dead bodies instead of the killer having no opposition while everyone waited for the guys with guns to drive over. We also can't forget the fact that someone who doesn't care about laws against homicide isn't going to care too much about your gun laws, so the only thing these tighter laws will do is make it less likely that a law-abiding citizen will have the means to defend themselves or others against an armed assailant.

Oh, and let's just take a minute to acknowledge the fact that school is hard enough without making children feel as if they're in prison with trained guards always present and watching their every move. There are a lot more productive things law enforcement officers can be doing, trust me. I went to a high school that, after having a bomb threat during both my freshman and then sophomore years, felt it was necessary to place armed state troopers wandering the halls every day, have dogs come in and sniff the building regularly, limit us to an individuality crushing dress code to avoid bullying over clothes, and no longer allowed boys to carry a bag for their books. Girls just used their purses, so I tried my own man purse and was promptly disciplined for wanting to avoid having my books knocked out of my hand while simultaneously making it easier to transport the books I was supposed to be learning from. Whatever happened to fostering optimistic, independent, and diverse young minds? Now, people like you just want kids to feel like a closely watched number and have a harder time focusing on any actual learning number because you're afraid and paranoid.

You also have no idea what you're talking about with NASA. NASA is incredibly important. Overpopulation of the planet is already becoming an issue and, naturally, as it worsens, the rate or reproduction increases. Children will someday be subject to war or systematic genocide due to a lack of resources and space. Someday, whether you like it or not, we either need to limit the population to levels about 66% of what they are now, begin bringing resources from space here, or colonizing hospitable extraterrestrial environments, man-made or otherwise. How are we supposed to do that without a space program, smartypants? That's just one thing NASA will do for us, beyond everything else they've already done. Even if it wasn't necessity in its purest form, NASA is cheap as hell compared to how much we spend on being better at killing people. It costs $1,000,000,000 more than NASA's ENTIRE budget JUST to provide air conditioning for TEMPORARY tents and housing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total cost of keeping troops is about $20,000,000,000. That figure comes from Steve Anderson, a retired brigadier general who was Gen. Petraeus' chief logistician in Iraq. NASA's TOTAL budget is just $19 billion. That's just for keeping troops cool, which is probably one of the cheapest things the military does. Lets not forget how much money we spend on developing and manufacturing military technology so that we can be better at killing. Don't take my word for it. Look it up. I'll get you started. Here's my source: www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning-military-cost-nasa_n_881828.html

Look, you don't seem like a bad person, but posting this vitriol on a post that's celebrating a unique genre of art, especially when it's this misguided, is wrong. Protecting kids is a fine and noble effort, but you need to think these things through and look at actual facts before you convince other uninformed people to believe the same ludicrous stuff that you're spouting here.

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nighthawkich

12/29/12 at 3:09 pm

Curse the Brits for their lack of preparation and foresight (no redundancies, seriously?)!

Curse the Russians for disregarding basic scientific practice inherent to grade school science (dont piss in your petri dish, unless thats part of the experiment)!

Curse the US govt for not giving NASA the funding necessary to take their experiments further!

And curse Beyond9 and AldenSol for their endless inane flooding (I hope both of you are stricken with Alzheimers and forget how to Ctrl-V)!

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salah42

12/29/12 at 5:37 pm

www.sadasoft.net/category/free-programs

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QuantumLeaper

12/31/12 at 7:20 am

What the !@#$ this article is about drilling holes not gun violence. This article is about drilling holes in ice for research that quite honestly means nothing to the advancement of the human race. Some people will say that I'm ignorant and have narrow channels of thought, but seriously, of what importance is knowing what life lies in these lakes. Why bother with what type of life MIGHT be on Europa or Enceladus when a probe can be sent there instead. Sure it will cost many many many times more but more research can be done and rather than speculation we'll will have data from the actual locations. P;us, the only reasonable application of this research is to determine whether or not humans can colonize these astral bodies which is also rather "out there."