Antarctica's buried Lake Vostok has supposedly been breached by a Russian team, following an arduous and very expensive effort.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57372465/russian-team-reaches-antarctica s-buried-lake-vostok-say-reports/ Hold the presses. Here is a prediction on what they will find ... and if true, this little detail may uncover why the Russians spent so many petrodollars on what appears to be "science only", ostensibly with no commercial impact. Now, it is true that Russia does and has done meaningful basic scientific research over the years - defined as that which is not aimed at immediate financial success. However, it is easy to see why one would be a bit cynical of the ultimate motivations of Putin & Co - in recent years. The New Russia is essentially closer to a criminal enterprise than to a democracy, No? Anyway, onto the cynical prediction. Lake Vostok, which about the size of Lake Ontario contains water that is roughly 1 to 20 million years old at a temperature that that would freeze all the way down - were it not for the high pressure and a small amount of interior heat from the core of earth - heat that is filtering up in a way that keeps the lake liquid at the bottom, even with two miles of solid ice above it. This dynamic mechanism can be described as a "cold reflux" conditions, and it is why I predict that they Russians will discover that the lake contains heavy water in a high percentage! There is a known method for low temperature enrichment of heavy water, that would be slow - but a million years minimum is long enough to make a this kind of thing happen. Depending on the level of enrichment, the value of the water in the lake, based on the present cost of heavy water could be over $100 trillion if the demand were there. Of course, that never happens - since supply and demand would lower the price by many orders of magnitude. However, if there were a large market for heavy water at a hundred times less per gallon, the Russian effort could still be a winner and Putin's new company will take your order now. Deuterium oxide is about 11 % denser than H2O and freezes at 3.8 °C, 277 K, 39 °F, following which it sinks. That's right - deuterium ice sinks at a rapid rate in cold water, as is often demonstrated in first year physics. The column of ice above lake Vostok is not solid and is always in a state of a slow-motion version of this dynamic effect, since the ice is under pressure. Importantly, deuterium will also gradually "jump around" to replace protium in adjacent water molecules to form heavy water (D2O) preferentially over DHO in a process of self-enrichment, due to QM and other factors. But the fact that D2O ice "sinks" preferentially, even in the mixed solid, provides a possible mechanism to enrich in a pressurized cold environment, over millions of years - where heavy ice is denser and has a bosonic nucleus. The slight affinity of bosons for absorbing IR over fermions could be the final piece of the puzzle - one that will only be apparent when we see the Russians constructing a pipeline to get the heavy water to market :-) You heard it first on Vo... Jones
<<attachment: winmail.dat>>
