New bid to find life under Antarctic ice

Press, 6 December 1977, Page 24

New bid to find life under Antarctic ice

NZPA Washington A bold new attempt is underway to drill through the 400 m-thick Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to explore a “lost sea world” believed to have been undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years.

An international team of scientists hopes to trap any specialised form of life existing in the frigid, sunless waters beneath the ice. A television camera will be lowered into the hole, followed by nets, traps, and baited lines, in the search for life.

“The discovery of any form of life underneath the thick ice shelf should be of great scientific interest as it would shed considerable light on the life processes taking place in complete and perpetual darkness,” said Dr John Clough, scientific director for the project. The first effort to penetrate the ancient ice sheet failed last December when a 30cm-drill hole was squeezed shut by the tremendous pressure of ice 300 m deep. Scientists were forced to abandon the project for the year. “They were thwarted by

the fact that temperatures were a little higher at depth than tney had expected and the ice showed a greater plasticity than calculations had led them to believe was possible — and so they were defeated,” said Dr Duwayne Anderson, chief scientist for polar programmes for the National Science Foundation. It had been decided to drill through the ice shelf at any cost this year.

Drillers returned to the frozen camp, 750 km southeast of the main McMurdo Sound base, early last month to begin drilling preparations. It is now approaching summer in Antarctica, the only time such activities can be carried out.

Messages reporting the progress of the work have been coming into the National Science Foundation headquarters in Washington every two days. A report last week said that drilling was about to begin, using a new flamejet drill that works like a high-velocity blow torch.

Use of the new drill to penetrate the ice will contaminate the melted ice water with hydrocarbon

compounds because the jet bums diesel fuel. But once through the ice sheet, Dr Anderson said that sea water pushing into the hole should block pollution of the underlying sea. If all went well, the drillers should be through the ice in about a week. An international team of scientists will be on hand to explore the water world below.

“There is hardly any place in the earth’s biosphere which rivals the isolation and uniqueness of the Ross Ice Shelf — not even the abyssal trenches or underground caverns,” said Dr Clough. The shelf, about the size of Spain, is believed to have formed hundreds of thousands of years ago during the pleistocene ice ages. Dr Clough said that the water below may harbour the only remaining community of organisms undisturbed since that time.

The project is supported by the United States, the Soviet Union, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand and Norway. The United States National Science Foundation is paying $4.7M as its contribution.