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An oxygen-rich lake, unreachable for the past 14 million years and buried beneath a thick sheet of ice, is about to be penetrated by a drill bit from a faraway place. It"s possible that special life forms have adapted to live in this extreme environment, and scientists hope to learn more once they can analyze water samples.

No, sorry, it"s not on Europa - it"s in Antarctica. But the environment of Lake Vostok, which Russian scientists are about to drill open, is very similar to that Jovian moon and to Enceladus, a frozen satellite of Saturn. Astrobiologists are among those eager to uncover Lake Vostok"s Miocene-era secrets.

The Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, a body set up to protect the frozen continent, approved a Russian team"s process to extract water from the lake while preventing contamination, according to New Scientist. By the end of this month, a team from Russia"s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg expects to hit water.

The lake"s water pressure will push the drilling fluid up into the borehole, where it will freeze. Next year, researchers will return to extract that ancient water and analyze its contents.

Efforts to drill into Lake Vostok have been stalled since 1998, when the treaty organization stopped the Russian team"s work until further environmental studies could prove the lake would not be polluted. Later studies showed this would be tricky - in 2003, NASA astrobiologists said the lake"s high nitrogen and oxygen levels would cause the water to fizz like a shaken soda can, opening the lake to possible contamination and even posing a threat to the scientists.

Lake Vostok has oxygen levels 50 times that of other freshwater lakes, so scientists believe life would have had to evolve protective enzymes or other adaptations to survive. If so, these extremophiles could have implications for life on Enceladus or Europa.

No one is sure where the ice-water boundary lies, so scientists are not sure when they"ll break through.

[New Scientist via Wired UK]

All the news about devastating tsunamis is drawing greater attention to a new claim that researchers have found the lost city of Atlantis - buried in mud on the southern tip of Spain. Scientists say they have found proof of a 4,000-year-old civilization that was buried by a tsunami.



The research was unveiled Sunday in a new TV special.

This effort to find Atlantis began in 2004, when German physicist Rainer Kuhne identified some strange features on satellite photos. Swamps at the mouth of Spain"s Guadalquivir River, northwest of Cadiz, held strange geometric shadows that some thought resembled the remains of a ringed city.

To follow up on the findings, teams of researchers from three countries used ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography, magnetometers and spectrometers to map the ground and sniff out evidence of human-built objects buried in the mud. They say they found a communal oven and evidence of canal systems buried in Spain"s Donaña National Park.

Richard Freund, an archaeologist from Hartford University in Connecticut, said a tsunami flooded the ancient community, located 60 miles inland.

"This is the power of tsunamis," he said, according to Reuters.

The team also found artifacts from farther north that suggest refugees may have settled a second city, where they built memorial artworks to commemorate the one they lost.

Other researchers criticized the results, however, including members of a Spanish team who have been studying the site since 2005.

Archaeologists have been looking for Atlantis since Plato first described it about 2,600 years ago in one of his late dialogues. He said the city was located near the "pillars of Hercules," which classical scholars say is the Strait of Gibraltar. (The mudflats are just north of the strait.) Plato said Atlantis "in a single day and night... disappeared into the depths of the sea."

Previous attempts to find it have looked on the ocean floor; on various Mediterranean and Aegean islands; the Bermuda Triangle; Bolivia; and even Antarctica. Historians have said Atlantis was inspired by the 1600 BCE volcanic explosion at Santorini, one of the largest in recorded history. Others maintain it"s simply a myth.

The Spanish team said they will present their own findings later this year.

[via Vancouver Sun]