Vostok
So the Russian team has finally reached the subglacial water lens in Antarctica called Lake Vostok, which may or may not have been a closed ecology for the last 14 million years. They’ve been drilling down to the lake for 20 years, and have attracted a lot of criticism about their technique, which might contaminate the lake with surface biota and chemicals.
I went looking for some discussion of that controversy in the news this morning, and I couldn’t find it. However, from the Russian state-owned newspaper, RIA Novosti, I got the following:
It is thought that towards the end of the Second World War, the Nazis moved to the South Pole and started constructing a base at Lake Vostok. In 1943, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was quoted saying “Germany’s submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Fuehrer on the other end of the world,” in Antarctica.
According to German naval archives, months after Germany surrendered to the Allies in April, 1945, the German submarine U-530 arrived at the South Pole from the Port of Kiel. Crewmembers constructed an ice cave and supposedly stored several boxes of relics from the Third Reich, including Hitler’s secret files.
It is also rumored that later the submarine U-977 delivered the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun to Antarctica for DNA cloning purposes.
The subs then entered the Argentinean port of Mar-del-Plata and surrendered to authorities.
I pity the fact-checker at Novosti, but their staff writer should get hired for Hellboy III.
