After 20 years of drilling (20 years! Now that's dedication!), a team
of Russian researchers have reached Antarctica's Lake Vostok, which has
been trapped beneath more than 2 miles of ice for the last 14 million
years. And they've found something:
A preliminary examination of water samples from the ancient subglacial
Lake Vostok near the South Pole indicated that its inhabitants are not
to be found anywhere else on Earth, a member of the research team told
RIA Novosti.
The species of bacteria, whose traces were found in probes of water
from Lake Vostok, do not belong to any of the 40-plus known subkingdoms
of bacteria, said Sergei Bulat, a researcher at the Laboratory of Eukaryote
Genetics at the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute.
“After excluding all known contaminants…we discovered bacterial
DNA that does not match any known species listed in global databanks.
We call it unidentified and 'unclassified' life,” Bulat said.
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