After more than a decade of planning, three attempts were made in 2012-2013 to access, measure in situ properties and directly sample subglacial Antarctic lake environments. First, Russian scientists drilled into the top of Lake Vostok, allowing lake water to infiltrate, and freeze within, the lower part of the ice-core borehole, from which further coring would recover a frozen sample of surfac...

During the attempt to directly access, measure and sample Subglacial Lake Ellsworth in 2012-2013, we conducted microbiological analyses of the drilling equipment, scientific instrumentation, field camp and natural surroundings. From these studies, a number of lessons can be learned about the cleanliness of deep Antarctic subglacial lake access leading to, in particular, knowledge of the limitat...

the larsemann hills range is an ice-free oasis on the ingrid christensen coast of princess elizabeth land, east antarctica, which includes bharti island, fisher island, mcleod island, broknes peninsula, stornes peninsula, and several other islands, promontories, and nunataks. the larsemann hills is an ice-free area of approximately 50 km2, located halfway between the vestfold hills and the amer...

Airborne radar has detected approximately 100 lakes under the Antarctic ice cap, the largest of which is Lake Vostok. International planning is underway to search in Lake Vostok for microbial life that may have evolved in isolation from surface life for millions of years. It is thought, however, that the lakes may be hydraulically interconnected. If so, unsterile drilling would contaminate not ...

RNA viruses exist as complex mixtures of genotypes, known as quasispecies, where the evolution potential resides in the whole community of related genotypes. Quasispecies structure and dynamics have been studied in detail for virus infecting animals and plants but remain unexplored for those infecting micro-organisms in environmental samples. We report the first metagenomic study of RNA viruses...

Subglacial Lake Vostok is located ,4 km beneath the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and has been isolated from the atmosphere for .15 million yr. Concerns for environmental protection have prevented direct sampling of the lake water thus far. However, an ice core has been retrieved from above the lake in which the bottom ,85 m represents lake water that has accreted (i.e., frozen) to th...

years, like Lake Vostok, underneath the eponymous Russian research station at 77 degrees South. One of the largest lakes on our planet, Lake Vostok is comparable in volume to Lake Ontario. Back in 1998, a research team drilled around three kilometres deep into the ice shield stopping only a few hundred metres above the lake surface. The lower parts of the ice core, believed to consist of frozen...

We evaluate the use of Poisson reconstruction to generate a 3D bathymetric model of West Lake Bonney, Antarctica. The source sonar dataset has been collected by the ENDURANCE autonomous vehicle in the course of two Antarctic summer missions. The reconstruction workflow involved processing 200 million datapoints to generate a high resolution model of the lake bottom, Narrows region and underwate...

abstract         background and objective: microalgae are a group of algae that produce biochemical products consisting of a wide range of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins that are commercially valuable. interest in microalgal cultivation is currently blossoming globally. species of dunaliella are found in freshwater, euryhaline habitats of all continents, oceans including the dead sea and ev...

Subglacial lakes are widespread beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet but their control on ice-sheet dynamics and their ability to harbour life remain poorly characterized. Here we present evidence for a palaeo-subglacial lake on the Antarctic continental shelf. A distinct sediment facies recovered from a bedrock basin in Pine Island Bay indicates deposition within a low-energy lake environment. Diff...