Drill pierces lake; eldritch horror escapes or is otherwise unleashed as consequence of scientific hubris; Vostok station's radio transmissions cease suddenly; a team is sent to investigate... maybe they find the sole survivor of the original drill crew (he's gone horribly insane, of course), eking out an existence in what remains of the research station... he warns the investigators not to go down to the drill site...
And don't forget the Antarctic mountain range they discovered in 2008 (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16659-alpine-mountain-...) that exactly fits the description to the mountains of madness Lovecraft described so vividly. But it won't be the Eldritch Horror coming out of the lake, it'll be a Shoggoth (or God forbid, a multitude).
Maybe the writer was actually quoting, and the speaker felt the need to say "Celsius" because they couldn't tell whether they were speaking to an American. (Satellite phones probably have low sound quality, right?)
Actually, there are systems that have negative (absolute) temperature, and "a system with a truly negative Kelvin temperature is hotter than any system with a positive temperature".
These are strange systems that can absorb only a finite amount of energy. When they are almost "full" of energy, their temperature is negative. (For simple systems the negative temperature appears when they have more than the 50% of the maximal energy, but it depends on the system.)
This can not happen in normal systems. For example an ideal gas can absorb infinite energy, because the molecules can go faster and faster.
That's what you think. Who says there can't be a -1 degree Kelvin? Just because it doesn't make any sense sense to us whatsoever right now doesn't mean it couldn't exist.
Do I know how to reach -1 degree Kelvin? No. But 1920's physicists didn't know how to destroy entire cities in Japan with a hunk of metal, either.
The lake is massive. Thousands of gallons of freon would barely register as a contaminant. Moreover, the pressure of the water would tend to push up through the borehole (although Freon is slightly denser than water so some will likely seep down through the water column).
The real issue isn't potential chemical contaminants, but biological contamination. It's thought that the lake has been cut off from the rest of earth's biosphere for millennia. It's likely a biological time-capsule, but breaching the seal could expose it to modern life that could take over.
> Moreover, the pressure of the water would tend to push up through the borehole
That's the plan actually! The water would rush up and then freeze sealing the opening and keeping the ecosphere uncontaminated. It is not the freon that would be the problem but the bacteria that they would introduce in the lake. Now hopefully they have some contingency plan for bacteria contaminating our side of the ecosphere ;-)
I had read in an earlier article that their approved methodology was to pull back the instant they detected liquid water---which, due to the pressure of the ice sheet, would flow out of the hole---and withdraw the drill and go away for the winter; then come back in November and drill out cores from the now-really-well-frozen water that would have risen from the hole. Basically, using the lake's water to plug their borehole and protect the lake.
So I'm not sure what this kerosene and freon business is about.
I think this was the old borehole, they specifically didn't penetrate the lake so as to not contaminate it. They're using a different method or an adjacent hole with a sanitized drilling apparatus now. This is based on stories I've read about Vostok over the years, I don't have any extra knowledge on the situation there today.
that jumped out at me too, but one has to think that a bunch of clearly dedicated scientists (I'd have gone home at -10) would have given thought to pumping CFC's into a pristine lake.
Actually CFCs are not at all bad. They are incredibly stable chemical compounds that won't normally react with anything else.
The problem with CFCs is that you get a stable compound by reacting really reactive things together, and now they can't find anything they want to react with more. So when they get into the upper atmosphere and get broken apart by hard radiation, you now have really reactive stuff mixed in with the fragile ozone layer. And they act as a catalyst to break down ozone.
But you can breathe them all you want, and (assuming you got enough oxygen) will suffer no ill effects.
I wouldn't be so hopeful. One of my professors who works in Antarctica and drills lots of ice cores was bemoaning the Russian mismanagement of the Vostok drilling project.
"I feel very excited but once we do it there is no going back," Alexei Ekaikin, a scientist with the expedition said from Vostok Station. "Once you touch it, it will be touched forever."
"It's minus 40 (Celsius) outside," Turkeyev said. "But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon."
"The researchers switched to a new thermal drill head with a clean silicon-oil fluid to drill the rest of the way.[17] Instead of drilling all the way into the water, they will stop just above it, when a sensor on the thermal drill detects free water. At that point, the drill will be stopped and extracted from the bore hole, thereby lowering the pressure beneath it and drawing water into the hole and left for quite some time to freeze, creating a plug of frozen ice in the bottom of the hole. Finally, next summer, the team would drill down again to take a sample of that ice and analyse it.[1][18]"
It doesn't matter how compressible it is, its temperature still rises from pressure. That is why ice is so slippery, pressure (from a tire, foot, or ice skate) melts a thin layer of water on the surface which acts as a lubricant (which is also why ice stops being slippery when its temperature gets low enough that normal pressures can't raise it enough to melt).
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok - The average water temperature is calculated to be around −3 °C (27 °F); it remains liquid below the normal freezing point because of high pressure from the weight of the ice above it. Geothermal heat from the Earth's interior warms the bottom of the lake. The ice sheet itself insulates the lake from cold temperatures on the surface.
Antarctica? Check. Mysterious underground lake? Check. Driven scientists? Check. Extremely isolated location? Check.
Here's how I see it going down:
Drill pierces lake; eldritch horror escapes or is otherwise unleashed as consequence of scientific hubris; Vostok station's radio transmissions cease suddenly; a team is sent to investigate... maybe they find the sole survivor of the original drill crew (he's gone horribly insane, of course), eking out an existence in what remains of the research station... he warns the investigators not to go down to the drill site...