Lake Vostok

For this blog, I just wanted to bring up the interesting story about Lake Vostok and what recently brought it into the news. Lake Vostok is about 800 miles away from the south pole and is buried beneath more than 2 miles of ice. Scientists believe that Lake Vostok has been cut off from the general atmosphere for about 20 million years. Scientists believe that about 35 million years ago the lake was most likely surrounded by a lush forest of greenery. Last year, Russian scientists drilled through to Vostok and started extracting samples. As the world waited patiently, the results came back as finding a bacteria that was new to science but was later disproved as sample contamination. At this point, new samples taken from the ice just above the lake have been analyzed and scientists found over 300,500 different stands of DNA most being bacterial and some even making it appear as though there may be fish populating the lake. Much of the DNA also points to life that usually exists around hydrothermal vents, suggesting that they might be present in the lakes as well.

I just wanted to share how amazed I am at discoveries similar to this that seem to be being made on a quite regular basis recently. This story is similar to the untouched lake that was found a couple weeks ago that had been completely unaltered by man. As we're discovering these things, we need to take into account how they can help us in the future and how we need to preserve their state while running tests on them. It would be a shame to ruin such amazing places, as we're ruined most of the world, by overworking the area.