Lake Vostok in Antarctica. The largest subglacial lake in Antarctica

For the first time circles on the lake were recorded in 1999. At that time, nobody noticed any abnormal patterns. What are these circles, and where did they come from?

Mysterious Polar Patterns

April 5, 2010 The International Space Station from a height of 350 kilometers makes a fantastic photo. The photographs clearly show that the ice lake Vostok in Antarctica has two printed circles of almost ideal shape. On the images they seem small. But the diameter of each of them is almost four kilometers.

The first scientific assumptions

The fact that under many kilometers of ice can exist life, the first suggested by Academician Andrei Kapitsa. He conducted seismic studies and found out that in central Antarctica, under a four-kilometer thick ice, there is a lake of incredible dimensions - an area of 20,000 m². This is ten times more than the principality of Monaco. It is located right under the Soviet research station. This subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica is still one of the most interesting mysteries for mankind.

Is there life in Antarctica

During the study, Soviet scientists found that under the ice is a hemisphere filled with oxygen, which has its own climate and unique ecosystem. Temperature fluctuations of water in the lake are +10 ... +18 ºС, as in the spring in the Black Sea. This can only mean one thing - under the multilayer thickness of the Antarctic multi-kilometer ice there is life, and it is fundamentally different from all that we are used to.

Flying helper

For almost 20 years, Russian scientists, together with their French counterparts and experts from the United States, have been studying the subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica. To find out which organisms live there for millions of years, they created a special under-ice transport vehicle - cryobot (or hydrorobot). With the help of jets of hot water, he must drill a well in 3,5 km, then wait until the space above it freezes. After this, the robot sterilizes itself and continues drilling. Having melted the lid of the ice dome and descended into the lake, it transmits information to the surface for further study.

New discovery of Lake Vostok in Antarctica

In March 2011, when the drilling rig needed to drill still only 120 meters, due to insufficient funding a unique lake in Antarctica stopped studying and closing the project. And this despite the fact that literally six months before, scientists have made a fantastic discovery. They found out that Lake Vostok is by no means the largest homogeneous ice formation. Natural areas of Antarctica, in contact with the ice, form ice islands. It turned out that there are hollow under-ice formations, the so-called pocket cavities, in which water reaches different depth levels. In addition, the unique underwater relief of Antarctica in some places has a depth of more than a thousand meters, that is, twice as many as previously thought. But the most surprising thing is that near the southeastern part of Lake Vostok a large magnetic anomaly is observed.

Polar lakeside owner

In other words, someone or something causes indignation under a four-kilometer thick ice. Who can cause magnetic anomalies under the ice, scientists do not yet know. The most daring researchers suggest that some reasonable beings do this, and the evidence, in their opinion, is there. The relief of Antarctica was captured directly from outer space only two months after the research work on the mysterious lake was suspended. Copies of photographs depicting circles on the surface of frozen Lake Vostok were studied by specialists from the London Research Institute. British scientists carefully analyzed the entire area of Antarctica around the water body and put forward a sensational version. The drawings are painted on the inside of the ice cover, which means that circles on the ice of the lake may appear due to the fact that an unexplored submarine civilization lives under the water column. Perhaps under the water there are some bases, and this, you will agree, is a very interesting fact. Mankind is less aware of the depths of the oceans than of the lunar soil. So we have to study our planet for a long time.

Mysterious Antarctica

Russian scientists do not agree with the opinion of their British colleagues. They believe that the area of Antarctica photographed from space, with its mysterious patterns on the lake, is not at all traces of the underwater civilization, but simply the quirks of nature, and they formed at the expense of warm undercurrents. Experts argue that if there was a reasonable life at the bottom of the lake, they would have discovered it long ago. Many people think that the situation is the same as with the circles on the earth's fields, they say, this is the work of the person. Someone specially falsifies such drawings, and someone considers them to be one of the forms of contemporary art. There is an opinion that such meteorological features of Antarctica are caused, for example, by slight temperature fluctuations. After all, the sphere and the circle are natural forms that are formed in nature by themselves. Four-kilometer circles on the surface of the sub-ice Antarctic lake could indeed prove to be some kind of natural phenomenon, if not for one thing. The natural zones of Antarctica are such that, in order for the steams to form, the flow must literally boil - this is the law of physics. But in places where mysterious prints were found, the thickness of the ice reaches three kilometers. To date, the scientific world does not know of any underwater current, capable of eroding such a dense ice.

What we know about the South Pole

The geographical coordinates of Antarctica are determined from its highest point, Cape Sifre (63 ° 14'S and 57 ° 11'W). This continent is the most isolated of all the surfaces of the globe. By area, Antarctica can be compared with the South American continent. All approaches and approaches to the icy "monster" are blocked by huge icebergs and ice fields. In winter, it's impossible to get to the ice continent. In addition to moss and lichen, nothing more grows here. Constant cold storm winds make this frozen continent almost impossible for human habitation. The entire vital infrastructure of a few of its inhabitants (polar explorers) is supported from a large land. Extraction of natural resources, the importation of weapons and military equipment, by international agreement, to the continent is strictly prohibited. Antarctica can not belong to anyone. But every year to the southern top of the earth's surface ships and planes with new polar scientific expeditions are sent, which have certain tasks. What are they looking for here and what secret are hidden by the rivers and lakes of Antarctica?

The development of the polar continent

On July 1, 1957, sixty-seven countries agreed to conduct scientific research on a single program throughout the world. It was an unprecedented experiment. A grandiose offensive began on Antarctica. Thirteen ships rushed to its banks. Each country had to build its wintering station in the strictly assigned sector. The Soviet Union got a section between 80 and 105 east meridians. The flagship of the first Soviet expedition, the diesel electric ship "Ob" arrived here in the January-month of 1956. Soviet polar explorers first saw Antarctica. An interesting fact: it is noted that the coldest temperature of the air on Earth was recorded precisely in the area of the station "Vostok". Here on May 21, 1983, polar meteorologists recorded -128.56 degrees Fahrenheit, or -89.2 Celsius.

The world resonance from unusual finds

The discovery of Russian polar explorers excited the whole world scientific community. In particular, carefully following the events around the expedition to Lake Vostok in Antarctica, Ichthyologists and jewelers watched. In the samples of water taken at a depth of 4000 meters, they discovered gold and traces of fish unfamiliar to science, which literally can be called golden.

Gold water of Antarctica

When lifting the ice rods from Lake Vostok, scientists discovered in him, in fact, gold metal. Micro-spectral study of ice and water of a unique ice lake showed that the concentration of gold ions in them is 80%. That is, it turns out that the content of gold ions in water corresponds to the gold ingot of the 700th test. Another thing is that the metal in the water is in molecular form, and it is almost impossible to see with the naked eye. One of the main tasks for polar exploration is the riddle of sterile water, in which so many metal impurities are found. There is an assumption that Lake Vostok is the largest gold-bearing residential, and space surveys confirm this. The ridge, which contains precious metal inclusions, may be a continuation of the underwater Yanococha deposit, which originates in the South American Andes, off the coast of the Republic of Peru. The proposed gold-bearing polar vein is not homogeneous in its chemical composition. In various parts of it, precious metal inclusions have a different molecular structure. The South Pole in this sense manifests itself as a magnet of planetary scales. It turns out that some of the gold-bearing metals simply mix with the water mass at the level of molecular diffusion. From the outside world, Lake Vostok in Antarctica is completely blocked by a thick layer of ice, so for hundreds of millions of years the content of precious metal can not escape. This earthly treasure is stored, as in an armored safe of a reliable bank, exactly under the Russian station "Vostok". Antarctica, the East (lake) is the territory of science. It does not belong to any state. But now a number of countries have outlined their position: they are seeking access to the riches that Russian scientists have found.

Goldfish in the underworld

The sensation was that Lake Vostok in Antarctica is inhabited. An unusual object, scientists, polar explorers found in one of the samples of ice samples, namely scales of some unknown science and mankind of fish. Scientists unofficially call it gold, which is completely justified. Precious metal, dissolved in deep waters, completely covers this mysterious fish with the thinnest layer. Judging by the size of the scales, this polar specimen has a length of the order of ninety centimeters. Such a unique Antarctic find can turn the whole of fundamental science. It becomes obvious that in the twenty-first century a fairy tale about a goldfish still exists. It remains only to hope that she is still alive and has not lost her fabulous and such seductive abilities to fulfill any human desire ...

The mystery of the polar nature

Until now, the question of the age of Lake Vostok remains open. At least 400,000 years, and maybe a million. How did it come about? According to the first hypothesis, from the friction of a multi-kilometer glacier with the earth's surface. It began to melt, and from high pressure the ice turns into water at a lower temperature, according to the law of thermodynamics. The second hypothesis assumes that there was always an ice sub lake. However, when it got colder, the continent shifted to the pole, it began to become covered with a crust of ice. For thousands of centuries, he completely isolated the water from the cold air.

Scientific hypotheses and further discoveries

What do these Antarctic studies give to the world civilization? Scientists call these findings extraterrestrial life on the bacterial planet Earth. If further inspection of the lake shows that there is no life, then this will also be an important discovery. As this will be the first ecological niche in which bacterial life is impossible. In both scenarios, this will be useful for finding extraterrestrial life on other ice planets, such as Europe, Jupiter's satellite.