Ever since humans landed on the Antarctic continent and established the Eastern Station at the Southern Magnetic Pole, holes have been drilled through the ice to obtain climate history records of different ice layers. In 1996, when the drill hole was 3623 meters deep under the ice, researchers found something strange, and then the drilling was stopped.
Subsequently, through investigation, the researchers found that there was a lake up to 500 meters deep under the ice and named it East Lake. The lake, which was sealed off by an ice sheet beneath the Earth's surface for about hundreds of thousands of years, is a truly "lost world."
According to continental drift, antarctica, once part of the supercontinent Waguna, is located near the equator, with lush vegetation, abundant aquatic grass, and a variety of dinosaurs and herbivorous reptiles living on the continent. About 80 million years ago, the supercontinent began to split, and some of them drifted to the South Pole to become Antarctica.
Then, about 65 million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth, wiping out all dinosaurs and large reptiles, and the distant antarctica was affected. As the level of the large temperature chambers fell, so did the temperature in Antarctica, and at about 34 million years, the surface waters of Antarctica began to freeze in winter. As the Earth continued to cool, large glaciers covered the Antarctic continent, all land animals, reptiles and amphibians became extinct, and the continent was buried deep beneath the ice sheet.
The reason why the East Lake does not freeze is because the extreme pressure of the ice sheet and the geothermal heat at depth allow the lake to obtain enough temperature to maintain the liquid. According to the researchers, the frozen lake water contains complex biological networks, including single-celled bacteria, fungi and protists, as well as more complex molluscs, worms, sea anemones, and even arthropods.
How did these creatures survive the bone-chilling cold, complete darkness, and 300 times the pressure of the landmark lake? If you think of the creatures that live in volcanic craters, acid lakes, and trenches thousands of meters above sea level, it is not difficult to imagine the biological systems in the East Lake.
A similar situation is found on Enceladus, not far from Earth. Enceladus is covered in snow and ice all year round, but beneath its surface is a vast ocean with hydrothermal activity. This is very similar to the situation in East Lake, and not long ago, data from Cassini showed that there are large organic molecules in the ice particles sprayed by Enceladus, which further illustrates the possibility of life.
Hawking once said, "What touched me most was the distant similarity in the universe." The universe is vast and contains thousands of galaxies, but the elementary particles that make up the universe are essentially the same. If extraterrestrial life exists, how different are the elementary particles that make up extraterrestrial life and the elementary particles that make up life on Earth?