Lake Vostok, the lake under four kilometres of ice
Hinted at by Andrey Kapitsa's seismic soundings of 1959 and 1964 and seen by satellite altimetry in 1993, Lake Vostok was mapped by Russian and British scientists and announced in Nature on 20 June 1996: a freshwater lake about 250 km long sealed under the ice.
1996 CE · -77.50, 106.00 · status: official
The account
It is the largest of more than 600 known subglacial lakes, lying about 4,000 m under the ice and 500 m below sea level. A magnetic anomaly about 105 by 75 km on its eastern shore has fed online talk of buried bases or ships; researchers attribute it to thinner crust. Isolation for perhaps millions of years made it a target in the search for extreme life.
The sceptical view
The magnetic anomaly is a geological feature measured in the open literature, not a sign of a structure.
Connections in the atlas
- The Gamburtsev Mountains, an Alps under the ice
- The drilling into Lake Ellsworth that failed
- Life found in Subglacial Lake Whillans
- 'Organism 46-B' and the secret under Antarctica
- The oldest ice: a million years under Little Dome C
- The 'unknown bacterium' from Lake Vostok