According to NASA, Lake Untersee is an underground body of water resting in the snow-capped peaks of East Antarctica. Hidden like a time capsule, it provides scientists with a necessary resource with which to look back and study how life came to be formed. It has a very unique chemistry (i.e. pH = 10.4), and it contains the largest amount of dissolved oxygen that has ever been found in any freshwater ecosystem. The extreme and extraterrestrial conditions of this lake will allow scientists to better understand where life may be found underneath the ice of Mars.Dale Andersen is the principal researcher at the SETI and has conducted over 20 trips to the location. He states that the conically-shaped ‘stromatolites’ (microbial reefs that are similar to the oldest known fossils on Earth) found at the site will be extremely helpful in determining where life on Mars may be located beneath the ice of the red planet.
How does Lake Untersee stay oxygen-rich under thick ice
The most fascinating characteristic of this lake is its overwhelming abundance of oxygen. Due to perpetual ice cover, gases like oxygen and nitrogen are sequestered in this system. For thousands of years, the ice sublimates (changes directly into gas) at the surface, while new ice freezes from the bottom, forcing these gases into the water column. As per NASA, this results in a condition 150% more oxygen than any normal lake on Earth. This oxygen-occupied environment is thought by scientists to offer a viable habitat for alien microbial creatures living on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, where this same gas-sequestering process may be at work as well.
What was the “2-meter rise” mystery of 2019
In 2019, measurements from satellites and ground-based sensors observed an unprecedented and rapid 2-meter rise in water surface, a height of 2m in Lake Untersee over the course of just weeks.Scientists from the University of Ottawa describe how the dramatic rise occurred due to a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF). The outflow of about 17.5 million cubic meters of water from Lake Obersee via a breached ice dam caused the observed GLOF event. Additionally, microbial pinnacles are a few centimetres tall in most lakes in Antarctica; however, they are half a metre tall in Lake Untersee because of its perfect stability, as discovered by SETI geobiologist Dale Andersen. Because there’s no wave action and there are no animals disturbing the bacteria due to the ice being permanent, the cyanobacteria have been able to very gradually grow to the limited amount of sunlight and build forms that are unlike anything seen on Earth in over 3 billion years.
Why Lake Untersee’s microbial pinnacles are ‘scientific gold’
The pinnacles found at the bottom of the lake that are half a meter tall have a lot of mystery surrounding them, because they shouldn’t be able to survive in an extreme environment such as this. These are conical stromatolites formed by cyanobacteria. The NASA Earth Observatory states that these organisms provide them with a skyline marker for identifying organisms.By examining the process of forming these pinnacles, scientists will be able to identify similar types of organisms on frozen surfaces of Mars and in ice crusts on Europa.
