As the lake fills and drains, which takes about the same amount of time, all those nutrients slip and slide their way to the ice-covered coast of the Southern Ocean. Using mass balance calculations, the team's research shows that a pool of dissolved organic carbon in the Whillans Subglacial Lake can be produced in 4.8 to 11.9 years. They still show signs of life - organic carbon and other chemical byproducts of living, eating, excreting and dying - that Vick-Majors and her team can measure and budget. Not that humans, penguins or fish could handle it life in the waters beneath Antarctica's ice is mostly microbial. The lake bed looks more alien than earth, and studying extreme environments like this does provide insight into what extraterrestrial life could be like or how earthly life might survive in similar conditions. Instead, as cameras dropped down the borehole of Mercer Subglacial Lake (a neighbor of Whillans) reveal, the subglacial lake is dark, cold, full of soft and fluffy sediment, and lined with bubble-filled ice. Organic carbon, an important food source for microorganisms, is present in relatively high concentrations in Whillans Subglacial Lake, even if it lacks the verdant mess of a Midwest pond in late August. Life beneath the ice puts up with a lot - there is no sunlight and pressure from the ice above in combination with heat radiating up from the Earth's core is what melts the water to form the lake, so the temperature hovers just below freezing. "This paper is putting together what we know about the biology and how active it is under Antarctic ice with information about the composition of organic carbon in the lake." "Life is tough - it can handle a lot," Vick-Majors said. Trista Vick-Majors, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Michigan Technological University, is part of a team that gathered samples from the Whillans Subglacial Lake in West Antarctica and is lead author on a paper about the lake, recently published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. Gathering data on the biogeochemistry of these systems is an undertaking of Antarctic proportions.
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