The Lost World

A while back I had heard of mysterious happenings down in Christchurch of all places! An increase flow of international scientists commuting through Christchurch to Antarctica. The speculation, A discovery of huge scientific value. Buried under 4km of ice, A liquid lake under the ice sheets of Antarctica, untouched by our world for over hundreds of thousands of years.

"In 1957 the Russians established a remote base in Antarctica – the Vostok station. It soon became a byword for hardship – dependent on an epic annual 1000km tractor journey from the coast for its supplies. The coldest temperature ever found on Earth (-89°C) was recorded here on the 21st July 1983. It’s an unlikely setting for a lake of liquid water. But in the 1970’s a British team used airborne radar to see beneath the ice, mapping the mountainous land buried by the Antarctic ice sheet. Flying near the Vostok base their radar trace suddenly went flat. They guessed that the flat trace could only be from water. It was the first evidence that the ice could be hiding a great secret.

But 20 years passed before their suspicions were confirmed, when satellites finally revealed that there was an enormous lake under the Vostok base. It is one of the largest lakes in the world – at 10,000 square km it’s about the extent of Lake Ontario, but about twice as deep (500m in places). The theory was that it could only exist because the ice acts like a giant insulating blanket, trapping enough of the earth’s heat to melt the very bottom of the ice sheet."

What lies beneath, they can only speculate. Possibly an entire flora and fauna of new species, maybe snap frozen fossilized ancient DNA, or maybe the ruins of a forgotten civilization that once lived on the shores of Vostok in temperate Antarctica. They estimate to reach the lake in 2010 - 2011.

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