Russia Drilled 2 Miles Into Antarctic Ice — The Lake Below Froze the Hole Shut

This is a cylinder of ice, pulled out of a borehole in Antarctica in early 2013. A year earlier it was lake water, in total darkness more than two miles down, sealed off from the sky for something like 15 million years. Then, on February 5, 2012, a Russian drill at Vostok Station broke through at 12,366 feet. The lake surged more than 1,200 feet up the borehole and froze the hole shut. So what is down there? And did anyone find anything alive in it? Lake Vostok is the largest of the roughly 400 known lakes under the Antarctic ice: about 155 miles long, around 5,000 square miles, liquid in the dark at roughly 27°F. In this documentary we follow one hole from the snow down to the water: the coldest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth (−128.6°F, July 21, 1983), an ice core holding about 400,000 years of the planet's air, a borehole filled with some 16,000 gallons of kerosene and Freon, the 2013 report of one bacterium nobody could place, the headline about "3,500 kinds of life" that came from old frozen lake ice, not lake water, and the second breakthrough in 2015. Then the other holes in the ice: Lake Whillans, where a clean sample turned up living microbes, Lake Ellsworth, where the drilling failed, and Mercer, where the mud held the remains of tiny animals, all dead. And why all this matters for icy moons like Europa and Enceladus. Where the sources disagree (on the lake's area, its depth, its age), we say so. And one thing up front: life in the water of Lake Vostok itself has not been proven. 0:00 Cold Open 0:25 One Hole 2:11 The Station and the Lake 4:02 How the Lake Was Found 7:01 The Hole and the Halt 9:28 The Great Argument 11:19 The Lake Pushes Back 13:01 The Russian Side 15:18 The American Paper 18:51 Life Under the Ice 22:23 The Slice Through the Ice 24:10 No Cover-Up 25:37 Open Questions 26:27 The Last Word Key sources Kapitsa et al., Nature (June 20, 1996): the lake announced; Petit et al., Nature (1999): the Vostok ice-core climate record Talalay, Annals of Glaciology (Cambridge): the 5G borehole, drilling history and breakthrough depths AP via Christian Science Monitor (March 2013): the unclassified bacterium; NPR (February 8, 2012): the breakthrough Shtarkman et al., PLOS ONE (2013): 3,507 sequences from Vostok accretion ice; National Geographic (July 2013): the reaction PMC8998000: microbes in the 2015 Vostok water samples; Bulat et al., EGU abstracts: contamination in accretion ice Christner et al., Nature 512 (2014): a microbial ecosystem beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet (Lake Whillans) Priscu et al., Annals of Glaciology (2021), ScienceAlert: SALSA and Mercer Subglacial Lake NBC News (2012): Lake Ellsworth drilling halted American Scientist; Scientific Russia: the coldest station on Earth Wikipedia: Lake Vostok, Vostok Station, Subglacial lake, Lake Whillans, Lake Ellsworth Subscribe to Depthmark to see what lies beneath — measured. #LakeVostok #Depthmark #Antarctica #EarthScience #Documentary