One of the Strangest Places on Earth Harbors 2800 year old Life

It's not a place you'd want to schedule summer vacation at, but Lake Vida definitely qualifies as one of the strangest places on Earth, and the more scientists learn about it, the stranger it gets!

Lake Vida is a lake buried under nineteen meters of ice in the barren and frigid wastes of Antarctica. Lake Vida is one of several lake basins in the McMurdo Dry Valleys near the coast of Antarctica, where less than 10 centimeters of snow fall all year and the temperature can drop to minus 30 degrees C. With a surface area of 6.8 square kilometers, the lake was believed to be frozen solid when it was first discovered in the 1950's. Then a survey conducted in late 1995 found that radar waves were absorbed 19 meters below the ice surface, implying the presence of liquid water. The researchers estimate that the water is about 5 m deep.

Seven times saltier than seawater, Lake Vida is similar in salinity to the Dead Sea, but with temperatures as low as ten degrees below freezing. No one expected to find any kind of life in the lake. Very salty water is toxic to many life forms. A few single-celled organisms exist in the Dead Sea, but Lake Vido is so much colder it was not thought that life could have survived. Such low temperatures often make protein molecules fall apart. To survive in such frigid temperatures, an organism would have to have special antifreeze mechanisms.

A team led by Assistant Professor Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago and colleagues decided to use drills to get some core samples of the ice just above the surface of the lake. They did not want to actually drill into the water itself for fear of contamination. Lake Vida has been sealed off for thousands of years from light and air from the surface.

What the scientists found in the ice cores literally shocked them. The core contained several layers of bacteria and algae clustered together. Carbon dating showed they were 2800 years old, but that was only part of the surprise. What really excited the scientists was that when they thawed and heated the microbes, they literally sprang back to life! This find could give new insights into life on Earth during the Ice Ages.

Doran now believes that life might exist in the water of the lake itself. Whatever life found would have to be strange indeed. Since no light ever reaches the lake, any microbes would have to get energy from chemical sources rather than sunlight. The microbes would also have to have some mechanism like antifreeze to protect them from the low temperatures and allow them to survive the freeze/thaw cycles and come back to life when exposed to liquid water.

The researchers plan to return to Lake Vida in 2004 getting additional funding from an unlikely source, NASA. The reason NASA is interested in Lake Vida is the implications it could have for the search for life on Mars. Mars is believed to have a water-rich past, and if life developed, a Lake Vida-type ecosystem may have been the final niche for life on Mars before the water bodies froze solid.

When they return, scientists plan to drill all the way through to the lake itself to sample some of the briny water. Because of the danger of contamination, all instruments will have to be sterilized. Specimens from the water are expected to be even older than the life forms extracted from the ice covering. The brine samples will be studied to determine what, if any, type of ecosystem exists.

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