Lake Vostok Drilling Attempt Stops

NASA image (Wikicommons)

If you've been following recent reports, you may know that Russian scientists felt they were in a good position to finally break through into Lake Vostok under the Antarctic ice. Students of history familiar with Miskatonic's Antarctic expedition know full well the dangers of such an attempt.

But now comes word that the project has stalled for at least a year, and an intriguing footnote: they poured kerosene into the borehole to keep it from freezing over. Environmentalists and other observers question the wisdom of dumping a potentially toxic chemical over a pristine uncharted lake.

But if we read between the lines, a more horrible possibility emerges. I estimate that if the borehole was about a foot or so across, they pumped in about 500 liters of kerosene. Not enough to kill any particular eldritch monstrosity, especially spread over that distance.

But enough to free one? Is some monstrous plot afoot? What horrors are about to be unleashed in the name of science, or under the guise of science.

As HPL put it

"I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps."

and of course

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

The Innsmouth Genes

Exhibit INS001 - Actinodin 1 & 2 (Image source: Bjorn Christen Torrensen, via wikicommons)

University of Ottawa researchers Jing Zhang and Marie-Andrée Akimenko have discovered that if the proteins actinoden 1 & 2 are suppressed in fish, fin development gives way to something like leg development. These two proteins are found in fish, but not in reptiles, mammals, or other tetrapods. (discussion, original article). The date of this original transition is immensely far into the past, and new research continues to push it back into the temporal gulf.

That such a small alteration is all that governs such a huge change should not be surprising to those familiar with the history of Innsmouth and similar communities.

"everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin."

- Zadok Allen, Innsmouth Massachusetts, July 15, 1927

One wonders what the researchers would find if they were able to examine biological samples collected by the federal investigation of Innsmouth.

UPDATE: Meet Tiktallik, the 375 million year old "fishapod" discovered six years ago. It has all the basic structures that will form the human body. Perhaps we should instead call it Dagon?

The Resurrected Lifeforms of Blood Falls

Blood Falls, Taylor Glacier, Antarctica. Image by Peter Rejcek. Much larger image here.

Exhibit ANT002: The Ecosystem of Blood Falls, Victoria Land, East Antarctica


First discovered in 1911 (the same year a Martian meteorite fell in Egypt with possible fossil evidence, as mentioned in the last post), Blood Falls gets its name from iron-rich deposits that produce a reddish runoff reminiscent of blood.

How Blood Falls work. Image by Zina Deretsky. Larger version here.

More intriguingly, recent research documents microbes and an ecosystem that were trapped in a saltwater lake two to four million years ago by the advance of Taylor Glacier, and then proceeded to adapt and produce a new ecosystem. Now, the sub-glacial water deposits are being released as the ice recedes. The microbes may utilize sulfur to process the iron oxide deposits and get small amounts of organic material in those deposits. This technique is extremely unusual. This unexpected ecosystem has serious ramifications for understanding possible extraterrestrial life in conditions on distant worlds we would find anathema to life.

You can hear more about it in an NPR review with scientist Jill Mikucki.

As with the potential alien fossils of ALH84001, we find parallels (in a similar vein the New York Times compares the case with science fiction) with the discoveries of the Miskatonic University Expedition Antarctica Expedition, as chronicled in At the Mountains of Madness

By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold's malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer. The saurian livestock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life—a thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.

...

The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early date in the land city's history. .... They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.

The alien-like, iron-eating bacteria of Blood Falls were trapped under a glacier, sealed under the ice in lake hundreds of meters below the surface. But like the Elder Things retreating into the watery abyss, they adapted to the dark and to the cold. And like the excavated Elder Things at Lake's Camp, their resurrection and return to the surface stains the ice of Antarctica blood red, though not for quite the same reasons.

The mention of saurian livestock also brings to mind other, less subtle tales of prehistoric survival in Antarctica

The BIOSOPE Marine Survey and the Barren Zone

Exhibit RLY001 - The BIOSOPE Marine Survey.

A four-month biological survey of the south Pacific identified and mapped in 2007 the most lifeless waters on Earth (though the area is rich in dissolved carbon, near Rapanui. The map above is a rough approximation of the area, more detailed maps can be found in media reports (here and here) and on the project website which features much more data on the anomaly.

As the map above depicts, this is a part of the Pacific with other suggestive hints, ranging from the monoliths and undeciphered records of Rapanui to the Bloop (more on that in the future) and the 1925 records of an element of R'lyeh, that perhaps there is more to this oceanic area hostile to earthly life.