Curiously Polar

Deep, dark and mysterious, Lake Vostok is one of the largest subglacial lakes in the world. Once a large surface lake in East Antarctica, Lake Vostok is now buried under more than 3.7 kilometers (2.4 miles) of ice near Russia's Vostok research station. Covered with ice for millennia, cut off from light and contact with the atmosphere, Lake Vostok is one of the most extreme environments on Earth. The lake has been ice-covered for at least 15 million years. Lake Vostok is one of the largest lakes on Earth in size and volume, rivaling Lake Ontario in North America. The lake itself is 230 km (143 miles) long, 50 km (31 miles) wide and as much as 800 meters (2,625 feet) deep. Lake Vostok sits near the South Pole in East Antarctica. The presence of a large buried lake was first suggested in the 1960s by a Russian geographer/pilot who noticed the large, smooth patch of ice above the lake from the air. Airborne radar experiments by British and Russian researchers in 1996 confirmed the discovery of the unusual lake. Lake Vostok harbors a unique ecosystem based on chemicals in rocks instead of sunlight, living in isolation for hundreds of thousands of years. The types of organisms the scientists found suggested they derived their energy from minerals present in the lake and sources from the underlying bedrock. Life in Lake Vostok doesn’t just exist — it thrives. Over 3500 different species have been identified, including a whole group of totally novel organisms. Lake Vostok is one of the easiest subglacial lakes to detect due to its size, yet most of its secrets remain.

While Antarctica is considered one of the most inhospitable places in the world by its ice and harsh conditions, the low temperatures on the ground provide some of the most breathtaking weather phenomena. Names like Brockenspectre, Green Flash or Halo arouse curiosity, but really exciting is the magic sounding diamond dust. Although there are low levels of precipitation in Antarctica, meteorological wonders abound and diamond dust is one of them! The air temperature in Antarctica is often low enough for water vapour to condense directly out of the atmosphere and form tiny ice crystals which then fall. On a sunny day these catch the sunlight and shine like a sprinkling of diamonds in the sky, hence the name diamond dust. If the crystals are orientated in exactly the right way they can give rise to brilliant halos. Diamond dust is also responsible for beautiful optical phenomena like sun dogs, halos and light pillars. CP 061 Ice and Flames: Those Mysterious Arctic Volcanos. Throwing hot water in the air

The single biggest mass of ice in the world, containing about 90 percent of the planet's freshwater ice and around 60-70 percent of the total freshwater on earth, covers about 98 percent of the Antarctic continent. But the continent is divided: In East Antarctica, the ice sheet rests on a major landmass, while in West Antarctica the bed can extend to more than 2,500 m below sea level. While the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is relatively stable, scientists claim that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt, it would raise global sea levels by about 5 meters/16 feet. At the same time, the landmass of Antarctica would rise out of the ocean. Several ice shelves surround especially the western Antarctic. The Ross Ice Shelf - a floating tongue of ice that extends off the continent's main landmass - encompasses more than 510,000 square kilometers and is the largest ice shelf that has ever been discovered. All in all, one can say that the largely unknown seventh continent deep in the south is truly a sheer incredible piece of ice.

The icy turtle shell of East Antarctica provides the perfect ground for the coldest place to find on Earth. A hundred little pockets of exceptional cold scattered across the highest parts of the ice sheet. The coldest spots were in shallow depressions in the ice, little hollows where the surface isn’t perfectly smooth. That’s probably because cold air sinks into these depressions as it sinks into a river valley or a canyon. During the long, dark polar winter temperatures are reached scientists think they are about as cold as it can possibly get in our corner of the solar system.

Being Antarctica’s largest native purely terrestrial animal, the Antarctic midge (Belgica antarctica) has the smallest genome in the insect kingdom. The holder of two Guinness Book of World Records entries spends more than half its life frozen. A better understanding of how it does survives freezing temperatures of up to -40 °C could have implications for human health.

In 1911, during an expedition to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor discovered a strange phenomenon on a remote glacier in East Antarctica: The lily-white ice of the glacier was being stained a deep red by water flowing from deep within the glacier. Taylor had believed it was due to algae discoloring the water, however that hypothesis was never verified.

For many years the source of the red color remained a mystery, as the mean temperature is 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (-17 degrees Celsius) and little glacial melting can be seen at the surface. But in 2017 scientists of the University of Alaska Fairbanks announced that they had discovered the cause.

The deep red coloring is due to oxidized iron in brine salt water, the same process that gives iron a dark red color when it rusts. When the iron-bearing saltwater comes into contact with oxygen the iron oxidizes and takes on a red coloring, in effect dying the water to a striking deep red color - and its name, Blood Falls.

Roughly two million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water that contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist in a place with no light or free oxygen and little heat, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron. After that, something eerily magical happens with the by-products. The iron in the water interacts with them to restore the sulphates, basically recycling the sulphates for the microbes to break down into oxygen over and over again. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

Furthermore, the scientists mapped the path of the water that feeds the five-story tall falls and explores how water can exist under the ice, unravel the inner workings of glaciers.

Given that the coldest ever land temperature was recorded in Antarctica (−89.2°C at Russia’s Vostok Station in 1983), it can be hard to imagine Antarctica as a warm, temperate paradise. But Antarctica hasn’t always been an icy land locked in the grip of a massive ice sheet. In fact, Antarctica was once almost as warm as Melbourne is today.

Researchers have estimated that 40-50 million years ago, temperatures in Antarctica reached up to 17°C. Scientists have also found fossils showing that Antarctica was once covered with verdant green forests and inhabited by dinosaurs!

Ice sheets have one particularly special property. They allow us to go back in time and to sample accumulation, air temperature and air chemistry from another time. Ice core records allow us to generate continuous reconstructions of past climate, going back at least 800,000 years. By looking at past concentrations of greenhouse gasses in layers in ice cores, scientists can calculate how modern amounts of carbon dioxide and methane compare to those of the past, and, essentially, compare past concentrations of greenhouse gasses to temperature.

The large Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have huge, high plateaux where snow accumulates in an ordered fashion. Slow ice flow at the center of these ice sheets (near the ice divide) means that the stratigraphy of the snow and ice is preserved. Drilling a vertical hole through this ice involves a serious effort involving many scientists and technicians and usually involves a static field camp for a prolonged period of time.

Shallow ice cores (100-200 m long) are easier to collect and can cover up to a few hundred years of accumulation, depending on accumulation rates. Deeper cores require more equipment, and the borehole must be filled with drill fluid to keep it open. The drilling fluid used is normally a petroleum-derived liquid like kerosene. It must have a suitable freezing point and viscosity. Collecting the deepest ice cores (up to 3000 m) requires a (semi)permanent scientific camp and a long, multi-year campaign.

Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica are mainstays of modern climate science. Traditionally, scientists drill in places where ice layers accumulate year after year, undisturbed by glacial flows. The long layer cake records from deep sites in the center of Antarctica reveal how greenhouse gases have surged and ebbed across hundreds of thousands of years. But because heat from the bedrock below can melt the deepest, oldest ice, the approach has not yielded ice any older than 800,000 years, from a core drilled at Antarctica’s Dome C in 2004.

Scientists from Princeton University retracted an ice core drilled in Antarctica that has yielded 2.7-million-year-old ice, an astonishing find 1.7 million years older than the previous record-holder. Bubbles in the ice contain greenhouse gases from Earth’s atmosphere at a time when the planet’s cycles of glacial advance and retreat were just beginning, potentially offering clues to what triggered the ice ages. That information alone makes the value of the sample incredible. [U794u53qxugp27yz581iEvyq2brib2or8wot34d]

In our first review of the year we look back on 36 episodes, on current events that have occupied us this year and dare a small outlook for another year of Curiously Polar.

Stricken by surprising, it is again time for perhaps the most wonderful time of the year. But one person is busy these days like never before. And every year we ask each other, where does he live? While every child knows, he lives at the North Pole and popular literature describes Santa's home amid coniferous forests, several places in the Arctic claim to be the official home of Santa Claus

While more than 11,000 scientists just officially declared a Global Climate Emergency, the wording has become more aggressive to underline the urgency linked to it. Respectable major media outlets like The Guardian and the New York Times have not only adopted this new wording, referring to a climate crisis and global heating rather than climate change and global warming, but also the way of "visually communicating the impact the climate emergency is having across the world."