There's Microbial Life in Lake Vostok After All

Okay, it’s all sorted out: There IS life in Lake Vostok after all.

In March, a team of Russian scientists proudly announced that they had drilled into Antarctica's deepest, coldest lake and found a new type of bacteria unlike any ever seen before. Then they announced that, just as the scientific community feared, their tests were contaminated and we should forget about new bacteria.

But now, researchers at Bowling Green State University have published a paper with PLOS One showing that they know how to avoid contamination, and also that Lake Vostok has quite a bit of life.

Lake Vostok has been covered in ice for 15 million years, and currently is under a glacier. The research team worked with samples of lake water that had frozen to the bottom of the glacier up to 10,000 years ago, as it creeps across the surface of the lake, labeled below as accreation ice.

The lake is so cold and cut off from light or the atmosphere that it was once thought to be lifeless or even sterile. But as life popped up in other extreme environments, including other long-buried Antarctic lakes, it seemed increasingly likely that, to quote a great scientist, life would find a way. And if it did, it would probably be some wild stuff. Lake Vostok is such a strange, harsh environment that it’s often compared to lakes on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

And not only is something alive down there, there’s actually a fairly diverse microscopic flora going on. They sequenced DNA and RNA found in the ice samples and identified fungi, two species of archaea—single-cell extremophiles—and thousands of bacteria.

Some of the bacteria types the researchers uncovered are commonly found in the digestive systems of fish, crustaceans and annelid worms in both the oceans and in freshwater, which indicates that the lake might have once been attached to the ocean, and is now taking on glacier water. Some of the microbes are heat-loving thermophiles and hint that there might be hydrothermal vents deep in the lake.

In spite of being a lake underneath the bottom of the Earth, "many of the species we sequenced are what we would expect to find in a lake," said Scott Rogers, professor of biological sciences and an author of the study, which is the opposite of what the Russian team said.

Perhaps to assuage any fears that the discovered DNA and RNA might also be a by-product of contamination, the paper explains how diligently the research team avoided contamination.

“Sections of core ice were immersed in a sodium hypochlorite (bleach) solution, then rinsed three times with sterile water, removing an outer layer. Under strict sterile conditions, the remaining core ice was then melted, filtered and refrozen.”

"Using this method, we can assure its reliability almost to 100 percent," Rogers said.

And lo, the Cold War continues.