While you were unwrapping present and stuffing your face with ridiculous amount of roast potatoes , a drill was making its fashion deeply into the icy depths of Antarctica in the hunting for life and biochemical curiosities .
Between the evening of December 23 and the night of December 26 , theSubglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access(SALSA ) project was meddling practice a 1,084 - m - deep ( 3,556 - groundwork ) borehole towards Lake Mercer , a mysterioussubglacial eubstance of waterthat ’s over twice the size of Manhattan .
The researchers have already sent down an instrument to assess the lake ’s depth and temperature , but there ’s much more to come . The new borehole will give scientist the prospect to study thepotential microbic lifelurking in the depths of Antarctica . The team also hopes to learn whether complex organisms , perhaps animals , live in Lake Mercer . SALSA will charge a remotely operated fomite down through the mess and use it to search the lake with the help of a television camera and a sample - snatching claw .
Who know , if life can consist in Earth ’s deep subglacial lakes , perhaps it could exist beneath the airfoil of Jupiter ’s wintry moonshine Europa and Saturn ’s moonshine Enceladus .
“ We do n’t know what ’s work to be there , ” undertaking leader John Priscu , an ecologist at Montana State University , toldNature News . “That ’s what makes it so much fun . ”
Peter Doran , a polar scientist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge , append : “ We need to start building our knowledge , because it turn out that this is a Brobdingnagian ecosystem that ’s completely undiscovered . ”
Scientists drill into another Antarctic subglacial lake , known as Lake Whillans , back in 2013and key that it ’s surprisingly home to a crew of different bacteria specie . Some 800 meters ( 2,624 feet ) beneath the ice , Lake Whillans is all innocent of any sunlight , so being are unable to obtain zip through photosynthesis . It is , therefore , suspected they are chemotrophic bacterium that incur Energy Department through chemical reactions with mineral , just like the bacteria you find in other extreme environments on Earth .
Also , do n’t feel too dark for the SALSA team who had to work over the holiday period in the starkly solitary continent of Antarctica . In between piece of work switching and building snowfall walls around their tent , they bring off to enjoy some Christmas celebration .
“ On Christmas Eve , several members of the SALSA Team participated in the annual Antarctic HF radio sphere camp Christmas caroling , ” according to astatementby SALSA . “ Although the foggy transmission made some of the radio promise very ambitious to listen to , the SALSA team sang their own reading of ' Feliz Navidad ' come with by Al Gagnon on the ukulele . "
