Lake Untersee is an Antarctic Lake home to the only known living conical stromatolites in the world. The bottom of this lake resembles much of what a putative pre-Cambrian ecosystem would have looked like, with microbial mats growing undisturbed. This habitat also serves as an ecological analog of other worlds in our solar system characterized by thick permanent ice covers, such as Enceladus, Europa and ancient ice-covered lakes on Mars.
Reaching this unique environment is an adventure in and of itself. We flew down from Cape Town, South Africa, to the Russian Antarctic base of Novolazarevskaya (Новолазаревская), a journey of 4200km on the Ilyushin (Илью́шин) plane. Our team spent a few days at the airfield base getting equipment ready to spend 6 weeks in the deep field camp at Untersee. The traverse to reach our camp is usually a 6 hours trip on snowmobiles or in the back of the sled pulled by powerful PistenBully vehicles, which can take much longer (up to 14 hours as happened for us!) The entire trip is on the ice plateu and special care needs to be taken to avoid crevasses.
Once at the lake, it took us about 4 days to set up the camp on the lake ice, with a communal tent, a dive tent and several sleeping tents. All tents were set up on plywood platforms for better isolation.
The lake basin is often swept by howling winds that can reach up to 160km per hour, being a real challenge for camp life and tents! The most rewarding experience as well as my main goal for the expedition was to collect several samples of the different stromatolites and mats that grow at the bottom of the lake. A surreal landscape opens under your eyes as you dare to enter the dive hole and explore this unique site. More humans have walked on the surface of the Moon than dived here at Lake Untersee!
Photo credits: Lara Vimercati, Dale Andersen, Klemens Weisleitner and James Grecian
Reaching this unique environment is an adventure in and of itself. We flew down from Cape Town, South Africa, to the Russian Antarctic base of Novolazarevskaya (Новолазаревская), a journey of 4200km on the Ilyushin (Илью́шин) plane. Our team spent a few days at the airfield base getting equipment ready to spend 6 weeks in the deep field camp at Untersee. The traverse to reach our camp is usually a 6 hours trip on snowmobiles or in the back of the sled pulled by powerful PistenBully vehicles, which can take much longer (up to 14 hours as happened for us!) The entire trip is on the ice plateu and special care needs to be taken to avoid crevasses.
Once at the lake, it took us about 4 days to set up the camp on the lake ice, with a communal tent, a dive tent and several sleeping tents. All tents were set up on plywood platforms for better isolation.
The lake basin is often swept by howling winds that can reach up to 160km per hour, being a real challenge for camp life and tents! The most rewarding experience as well as my main goal for the expedition was to collect several samples of the different stromatolites and mats that grow at the bottom of the lake. A surreal landscape opens under your eyes as you dare to enter the dive hole and explore this unique site. More humans have walked on the surface of the Moon than dived here at Lake Untersee!
Photo credits: Lara Vimercati, Dale Andersen, Klemens Weisleitner and James Grecian