The Vostok Station has pierced the ice into Lake Vostok and secured 40 liters of water. This is from an approximately 20 million-year-old lake, however, the water itself is estimated to be 13,000 years old. This might seem young compared to the lake itself, but it should then be noted that Lake Ontario (which is often compared to Lake Vostok in size and shape) has a water residence time of just six years.
There will be a few questions that this tank of water will be challenged to answer. How pure can water get? Will there be microbial life in the water? What keys to prehistoric life will this reveal? Those questions will have to wait though. The water sample they have has been left in the 2.34-mile deep borehole. What this means is we won’t have answers until the end of this year or at the very latest, January 2013.
Originally, Vostok Station was originally meant for studying magnetometry and ice core drilling for the purpose of analyzing the past environmental conditions of Antarctica. The drilling has been active for 37 years, and when discovery of Lake Vostok what confirmed, the task shifted to breaching the lake. The method of drilling with kerosene and freon drew the protest of the science community, and so drilling was temporarily put off in 1996 until a cleaner drilling method could be produced.
In 2003, drilling would continue, however, the ecological threat of contamination still loomed. Russian scientists explained that because of the immense pressure and temperature of Lake Vostok, this would not be an issue as jets of water would burst into the borehole and expel any contamination within the borehole away from the Lake Vostok and immediately freeze it shut.
On Wednesday, Feb. 8, water was jettisoned approximately 40 meters into the borehole as the drill was frozen into place. It won’t be until next season starting in the southern hemispheres summer during December that they will be able to work on pulling out the results of breaching Lake Vostok.