The Russians may be winning a new, very `cold war' in Antarctica
BY ROBERT S. BOYDKnight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The United States and Russia are locked in another cold war, this time over a hole in the ice at the bottom of the world in Antarctica.
The Russians lost the real Cold War, but it looks as if they're going to win this one.
At issue is their plan to continue drilling a hole they began in 1998 until they poke through the ice into a large, long-buried lake known as Vostok. They've already drilled 2.2 miles down, stopping only about 100 yards from the lake, and have declared their intention to go the rest of the way next year.
Scientists in the United States and worldwide are panting to explore Lake Vostok, but they worry that the Russians are plunging ahead without taking adequate precautions to avoid contaminating the hidden waters with their drilling equipment.
Researchers think that the lake, which is about the size of Lake Ontario and more than a half-mile deep, has been sealed off from the rest of the world for more than 10 million years, far longer than humans have been on Earth. They want to find out whether living organisms are growing down there and see how they may have evolved differently from life on the surface. The findings also could tell a lot about the possibility of life on the icy moons of Jupiter or on planets beyond our solar system.
The problem is the Russians are using a drilling fluid - a mixture of kerosene and Freon that's infested with microbes - to bore into the ice. If the fluid gets into the lake, scientists can't be sure that any organisms they find were in the water already or came from the outside, said Scott Borg, the head of the Antarctic Sciences Section at the National Science Foundation. That would destroy their scientific value.
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