MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Russia/US dispute over Antarctica ice drilling

United States and Russia are locked in another cold war, this time over a hole in the ice at the bottom of the world in Antarctica. At issue is the Russian plan to continue drilling a hole they began in 1998 until they poke through the ice into a large, long-buried lake known as Vostok.

They have already drilled 2.2 miles down, stopping only about 100 yards from the lake, and have declared their intention to go the rest of the way next year.

Scientists in the United States and worldwide are panting to explore Lake Vostok, but they worry that the Russians are plunging ahead without taking adequate precautions to avoid contaminating the hidden waters with their drilling equipment.

Researchers think that the lake, which is about the size of Lake Ontario and more than a half-mile deep, has been sealed off from the rest of the world for more than 10 million years, far longer than humans have been on Earth. They want to find out whether living organisms are growing down there and see how they may have evolved differently from life on the surface. The findings also could tell a lot about the possibility of life on the icy moons of Jupiter or on planets beyond our solar system.

The problem is the Russians are using a drilling fluid - a mixture of kerosene and Freon that's infested with microbes - to bore into the ice. If the fluid gets into the lake, scientists can't be sure that any organisms they find were in the water already or came from the outside, said Scott Borg, the head of the Antarctic Sciences Section at the National Science Foundation.

Alarmed by the Russian push, the National Academy of Sciences created a special committee to set "cleanliness" standards for drilling into lakes under glaciers or ice sheets, such as Vostok. It's not clear, however, that the Russians will pay any attention.

"The Russians aren't waiting for standards. They have decided to move forward," Borg said at the committee's first meeting earlier this month. "We have declined to participate (in the drilling). We don't feel it's ready."

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, an international organization based in Cambridge, urged the Russians to wait for further studies before penetrating the lake.

"It is extremely important to be very cautious," the committee's executive director, Colin Summerhayes, said in an e-mail message. He listed two main concerns: "accidental penetration of the lake" and contaminated drill fluid seeping into the water "through tiny cracks in the ice just above the lake surface."

The Russians say they've done a successful test drilling in Greenland and that Vostok won't be harmed. "I am convinced the concerns about possible contamination of the lake's water with the drilling fluid do not have any physical grounds," said Valerii Lukin, the director of the Russian Vostok project.

In accordance with their plan, the Russians drilled down another 30 yards this winter - summer in Antarctica - before stopping because of equipment problems. They plan to drill another 70 yards, put in a plastic plug, then switch to a machine driven by heat instead of kerosene to punch through the last 30 yards of ice in the winter of 2007-08.

Russia has promised to describe their latest plan at a meeting of Antarctic Treaty members in Edinburgh, Scotland, in June.

Vostok Station is located in one of the world's most inaccessible places, near the South Geomagnetic Pole, at the center of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station is 3.5 kilometers above sea level and the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth, -89.2 degree Celsius was measured at Vostok Station on July 21, 1983.

Lake Vostok's physical characteristics have led scientists to argue that it might serve as an earthbound analog for Europa, a moon of Jupiter.

Russian and British scientists confirmed the lake's existence in 1996 by integrating a variety of data, including airborne ice-penetrating radar observations and space borne radar altimetry.

Researchers working at Vostok Station have already contributed greatly to climatology by producing one of the world's longest ice cores in 1998. A joint Russian, French and U.S, team drilled and analyzed the core, which is 3,623 meters long.

The core contains layers of ice deposited over millennia, representing a record of Earth's climate stretching back more than 420,000 years. Drilling of the core was deliberately halted roughly 150 meters above the suspected boundary where the ice sheet and the liquid waters of the lake are thought to meet to prevent contamination of the lake.

Samples from this ice core, specifically from ice that is thought to have formed from lake water freezing onto the base of the ice sheet, have led scientists to believe they have found evidence that the lake water supports life.