Western Antarctic ice streamsNASAA team of US-based researchers announced yesterday (January 28) that it has retrieved samples of liquid water and sediment from the Whillans Ice Stream, a subglacial lake buried under 800 meters of ice at the edge of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Having arrived at the site earlier month after a 1,000-kilometer trek the US-owned McMurdo research station, the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) team used a special environmentally clean hot-water drill to bore a 30-cm-wide hole in the ice. The untainted samples brought up are now being analyzed at a temporary lab onsite for evidence of microbial life. Some of the samples will be returned to the United States for further analysis in order to answer long-standing questions about Antarctica’s climate history and whether subglacial lakes stabilize or destabilize the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, which appears to be losing mass at a worrying pace.
The breakthrough—the first retrieval of fully intact liquid samples from a subglacial lake—caps a busy period of Antarctic research, ...
