Toribash
Originally Posted by Gorman View Post
The ice is 4000 meters thick, so its a lot of drilling, and they don't want to contaminate the lake which could kill whatever is down there.

They are sending a probe.


Would the probe contaminate the water to? I do not think that what your saying makes any sense because anything from outside of the ice would contaminate the water would it not?
Originally Posted by Tempor View Post
Would the probe contaminate the water to? I do not think that what your saying makes any sense because anything from outside of the ice would contaminate the water would it not?

When they say contaminate they are talking about things such as soil or dirt or unsanitized areas that could contain microbes that could damage the ecosystem.

To use a metaphor, when sailors visited the islands the Dodos were on, there were rats on their ships, which eventually wiped out the Dodos (among other factors). The rats are essentially the contaminant, where as the ship is the probe.

They have to be very careful to not introduce anything potentially harmful in to this sealed ecosystem, that they can not observe without risk.
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This is pretty awesome, I just hope they dont get too exited and contaminate all over the place.
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Wouldn't having to burrow through 4000 meters of ice effectively incapacitate any microbes on the probe anyway? I mean most bacteria we know of are active at warm temperatures, die when it gets too hot, and freeze up when it's too cold.
Originally Posted by 4zb41 View Post
Wouldn't having to burrow through 4000 meters of ice effectively incapacitate any microbes on the probe anyway? I mean most bacteria we know of are active at warm temperatures, die when it gets too hot, and freeze up when it's too cold.

Did you watch the cave that some weird insects existed were they didn't even need the sun light? That's why they think that there might be a possibility that they could find bacterias deep between those ice sheets.
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I'm not arguing whether there's bacteria down there. Rather i'm suggesting any bacteria on the probe that may contaminate the lake will be incapacitated due to extended exposure to the ice the probe is drilling through.
Originally Posted by 4zb41 View Post
I'm not arguing whether there's bacteria down there. Rather i'm suggesting any bacteria on the probe that may contaminate the lake will be incapacitated due to extended exposure to the ice the probe is drilling through.

I'm sure a bunch of NASA scientists and biologists have thought of this. Did you not watch the video? Even dead microbes are contaminants because there's no way of telling whether they came from the drilling or from the lake itself.
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One time microbes were find on the outside of a space shuttle, alive and kicking, it hitched a ride there from Earth.





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