Nations at odds over drilling into buried Antarctic lake

By ROBERT S. BOYD
Knight Ridder Newspapers
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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 will win this one.

At issue is the Russians’ plan to continue drilling a hole they began in 1998 until it pokes through the ice into a large, long-buried lake known as Vostok. They already have drilled 2.2 miles, stopping about 100 yards from the lake, and have declared their intention to go the rest of the way next year.

Scientists worldwide are eager 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 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 existed. 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 could also tell a lot about the possibility of life on the icy moons of Jupiter or on planets beyond our solar system.

The problem is that the Russians are using a drilling fluid — a mixture of kerosene and Freon that is infested with microbes — to bore into the ice. If the fluid gets into the lake, scientists cannot be sure that any organisms they find were in the water already or came from the outside, said Scott Borg, head of the Antarctic Sciences Section at the National Science Foundation. That would destroy their scientific value.

Alarmed by the Russian push, the National Academy of Sciences created a special committee to establish “cleanliness” standards for drilling into lakes under glaciers or ice sheets such as Vostok. It is not clear, however, that the Russians will pay any attention.

“The Russians aren’t waiting for standards,” Borg said recently at the committee’s first meeting. “They have decided to move forward. We have declined to participate (in the drilling). We don’t feel it’s ready.”

The Russians said that they did a successful test drilling in Greenland and that Vostok will not be harmed.

“I am convinced the concerns about possible contamination of the lake’s water with the drilling fluid do not have any physical grounds,” Valerii Lukin, director of the Russian Vostok project, told the journal Science last fall.

In accordance with their plan, the Russians drilled 30 yards this winter — summer in Antarctica — before stopping because of equipment problems. They plan to drill 70 more yards, put in a plastic plug, and then switch to a machine driven by heat instead of kerosene to punch through the last 30 yards of ice in the winter of 2007-08.

They will describe their latest plan at a meeting of Antarctic Treaty members in June in Edinburgh, Scotland.
On the Web

Lake Vostok fact sheet