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Lake Vostok may harbor ingredients for a complex subglacial ecosystem

Even by Antarctic standards, the Lake Vostok research station is inhospitable. The outpost at the heart of the frozen continent holds the record for the lowest naturally occurring temperature ever observed on Earth. Scientists commonly describe the place as punishing, unforgiving, the most desolate place on the planet.

That’s nothing. Nearly 4,000 meters below the station, beneath the crushing East Antarctic ice sheet, sits an enormous body of water. Lake Vostok has existed for millennia in dark, frigid isolation, presumably harboring nothing but the toughest microbes.

But now a Russian team has drilled through the ice, breaching Lake Vostok for the first time in 15 million years. Bits of genetic material in ice core samples of frozen lake water include DNA not just from microbes, an analysis published in July contends, but hints of much more complex life: a water flea, a mollusk, maybe something related to a sea anemone. Even more intriguing, some genetic sequences appear similar to bacteria and parasites typically found living inside fish, lobsters and shrimp.

Many researchers find the claim hard to believe. Lake Vostok just seems too deep, too cold, too dark for complex life. Maybe the researchers who discovered the DNA accidentally contaminated their samples with genetic material from the surface, some microbiologists suggest. Or maybe the researchers are just pushing the genetic data too far, seeing similarities to complex life in what are really just scraps of bacterial DNA.

But unlike other recent claims for the existence of life in otherworldly environments, most notably the now-debunked discovery of arsenic-based life in California’s Mono Lake (SN: 2/25/12, p. 10), the case for complex life in Lake Vostok doesn’t require rewriting basic rules of biochemistry. It does require creating an intricate ecosystem in the absence of sunlight and photosynthesis, but there is nothing to rule out the possibility that a strange and otherworldly collection of creatures is waiting to be discovered deep beneath one of the most remote places on Earth.

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