showthread.php?postid=22938A Russian team searching for signs of life beneath a 14 million-year-old frozen Antarctic lake has had to halt drilling just a few metres from water, potentially damaging twenty years of work in the process.
The team -- headed up by the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg -- had to call off work just 29 metres short of the end goal because the Antarctic winter is fast closing in. News that they plan to fill the 3,749m borehole with kerosene to prevent it from freezing will further trouble groups who fear continued research will contaminate the lake.
On 4 February Alexei Turkeyev, chief of the Russian-run Vostok Station, told Reuters: "It's minus 40 [degrees Celsius] outside. But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good." Unfortunately Turkeyev and his team were forced to pack up last minute amid fears they would be stranded. Temperatures above Lake Vostok fall to as low as -89.2 degrees Celsius during winter, the coldest recorded temperature on Earth.
The lake has been protected from the atmosphere and the other surrounding 150 subglacial lakes by a four kilometer-think ice cap. What lies beneath the mammoth sheet of ice may provide answers to what Earth was like before the Ice age and how life has evolved.- source
I stumbled across this thread in the archive.
Does anybody know if Hoagland still talks about his UFO/Vostok Theory?
Here is another from Enterprise Mission:
During the course of tracking recent events at the South Pole, one of the curiosities that has arisen centers on the bizarre involvement of the National Security Agency in “civilian” Antarctic research. Although JPL's Frank Carsey, who runs the JPL Vostok/Europa drilling project in Antarctica, confirmed that he had no knowledge of any current NSA drilling efforts similar to his own, he did make it clear that the NSA had been a source of major Antarctic research funding in the past, and that “their monies are now sorely missed.”
The history of Antarctic exploration (especially post WWII), with the heavy (and surprising) involvement of the US military and its “security concerns,” is a strange and unique tale that deserves more space than we can provide here (however, we will address this major subject in a later update). Suffice it to say, US security agencies have had a far deeper, if not mystifying, interest than they should have over the years in Antarctica -- given the desolate, non-strategic and totally isolated nature of the White Continent. Although there have been recent rumors of “a HAARP-like project” near the South Pole, it's unclear exactly what long-term national security interests may have been involved on the least populated continent (unless you're counting the penguins!) on the planet. What has become clear in the last five years is that Antarctica has unique research value in the context of at least one extraordinary new idea that does have rampant “national security implications”--
Life on Europa. - source
Not sure of a date on this...
