First view of the bottom of Antarctic subglacial Lake WhillansWIKIMEDIA, NASA/JPL-CALTECHIn January 2013, a team of US-based researchers announced that it had successfully extracted liquid water from the Lake Whillans, which lies 800 meters (2,624 feet) beneath the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. A week later, preliminary reports told of microbial life that was alive and metabolizing energy. Now, publishing in Nature, the researchers present confirmation that such life not only exists in the subglacial lake, but is highly abundant.
“The number of microorganisms we saw in the water was very comparable with what you’d find in a typical surface lake or in the ocean,” microbiologist and lead author Brent Christner of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge told ScienceNews. “We were very surprised.”
A Russian team is working on a similar project at Antarctica’s subglacial Lake Vostok, but some have questioned whether the evidence of life the researchers found in their samples were due to surface contamination. The current study of Lake Whillans “contained far fewer, if any, surface contaminants because of the ultra-clean drilling methods employed to get down through the ice to the lake body,” BBC News reported.
Because little light reaches the depths of these subglacial lakes, the ecosystems that exist ...
