Well, folks, it was nice knowing all of you…

…because the Russians finally drilled through to that damnable lake lurking under the Antarctic ice. Oh, goody, here’s another detail: the site’s being bathed in the eldritch geomagnetic energies of the magnetic South Pole!

Well, maybe it’ll be a while before whatever was under the ice gets to here.

Moe Lane

PS: Yeah, obviously they got back in touch with the Russian site.  Which is no doubt explaining in very simple Russian that da, everything is fine, no problems, everything is fine, no problems, everything is fine, but please send more dogs…

Let’s drill into an buried Antarctic lake? What could go wrong?

Fark Geek implicitly raises an interesting point: has this scenario ever ended well in any form of popular modern entertainment?

An ambitious plan to explore a vast lake trapped beneath the Antarctic ice is a step closer to becoming reality.

An advance party has braved freezing temperatures to set up vital equipment and supplies at Lake Ellsworth.

The project by UK engineers to drill through the two-mile-thick ice-sheet is scheduled for the end of the year.

I mean, in terms of cinema alone a heck of a lot of films about Antarctica seem to have as their plot the old “We wake up something under the ice and it starts eating people.”  Admittedly, the quality of such films is, ah, uneven

Moe Lane Continue reading Let’s drill into an buried Antarctic lake? What could go wrong?

Great. Giant mountains in Antarctica.

Just great:

Alp-sized peaks found entombed in Antarctic ice

OSLO (Reuters) – Jagged mountains the size of the Alps have been found entombed in Antarctica’s ice, giving new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts, scientists said on Tuesday.

Using radar and gravity sensors, the experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains, originally detected by Russian scientists 50 years ago at the heart of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

“The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the (European) Alps, with high peaks and valleys,” said Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey who took part in the research.

Fark, of course, immediately twigged to the problem here, and it ain’t global warming. It’s the fact that there are big honking mountains in Antarctica, just like HP Lovecraft said that there were.  Which leads one to wonder what else the man was right about… if I was dumb enough to think about it too closely, of course. So I’ll just note that Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War” (found in his collection of short stories Toast) is a fun sequel to Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, particularly if you like Cold War-era paranoia.

And really, who doesn’t?