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Project Progress

The Skaftárkatlar Caldera is formed by an active volcano under the ice, located on the Vatnajökull ice cap in Iceland. Through collaboration with Icelandic colleagues, Gaidos and Glazer participated on an expedition to drill through the ice cap and sample the underlying lake waters for geochemical and microbiological analyses. Following several days of mechanical challenges associated with the hot water drilling process, the team was successful in creating a borehole through the 300m of ice overlying the lake. A temperature and pressure profile revealed a 100m deep lake at the base of the ice, kept liquid by upward fluxing geothermal heat. In the months prior to the expedition, Gaidos and Glazer worked with the Engineering Support Facility at UH-SOEST to design and build a custom water sampler for retrieving uncontaminated water samples from the lake, which was successfully deployed and collected a 500ml sample from ~1m above the lake bottom. By injecting a rhodamine dye into the borehole prior to sampling, and verifying no rhodamine in the collected sample, it is unlikely that the sampler leaked or otherwise allowed exchange between the drilling fluids and the lake sample. A suite of geochemical and molecular analyses are underway, but on-site voltammetric analyses revealed ~3mM reduced sulfide. The high concentration of sulfide, combined with preliminary interpretations of the temperature profile suggest that nearly the entire lake is likely to be anoxic. Early microscopic analyses suggest that a significant microbial community is present.

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