Ancient (Virgin) Cocktails for Putin & Scientists

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MOSCOW –  
It's a drink fit for a king -- T.rex, the king of dinosaurs, that is.

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin on Friday received the first sample of water from an underground lake in Antarctica that was hidden for an estimated 20 million years -- and joked that the water would be the perfect drink for a dinosaur. "Well, did you drink the water?" Putin asked Russia's Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev after being presented with a vial of ancient aqua, Reuters reported. "It would have been interesting, you know: dinosaurs drank it."

Trutnev, who was in Antarctica for the historic moment the lake was breached, assured Putin that he had not drank a drop of the water, which scientists have been waiting to study with bated breath.

"Well it would have been interesting you know: dinosaurs drank it," Putin reportedly said with a smile.
Putin's calendar is a bit off; a mass extinction likely caused by an asteroid impact ended the reign of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, scientists believe. But the lake is nonetheless crucial to scientific understanding of life on Earth. Scientists hope Lake Vostok could reveal new forms of life and help them understand the extreme conditions of Mars and Europa, Jupiter's moon, which researchers suspect could be hiding a liquid ocean beneath its frozen upper crust.

A Russian team successfully drilled down to Lake Vostok on Sunday, after a desperate battle against the clock before the brutal Antarctic winter set in.

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One Perk of Being an Arctic Researcher: Drinking 100,000 Year Old Glacier Water

The scientists who research our planet's poles have a tough, incredible job. Drilling tens of thousands of feet into the icy surface to retrieve core samples reveals a lot about our planet. It also provides a refreshing, pre-historic drink.

Edible Geography has a fascinating interview with Dr. Paul Mayewski of the University of Maine, who collects deep core samples from all over the world—from Antarctica to the Himalayas. By digging deeper and deeper, he and his team are able to examine the icy record to see what was up with the earth's climate thousands of years ago. Once a sample's been drilled out and retrieved, it's sliced apart with lasers for analysis.



Often, the findings of these core samples show a highly polluted atmosphere from the past. But does this stop the intrepid researches from taking a sip of the melted stuff? Hell to the no:

You might think you couldn't drink that water, because the whole point is that we've detected pollution in it. But these are the chemicals that have been traveling in the atmosphere, and so, yes, it might be a thousand times more polluted than the pre-industrial atmosphere was, but at the locations where we're sampling it, in these very remote areas, the pollution has had a long travel distance and a lot of it has dropped out along the travel route. We're looking at the very final fringes of it. We're still seeing dramatically elevated levels, comparably, but it's not anywhere near undrinkable.

Think that isn't badass enough? "We drink water from the nuclear bomb test era, and it has small amounts of radioactivity in it," says Mayewski. But it's no more dangerous than going out in the sun, he assures.



But alright, enough about the science—how does it taste? "About as clean as anything can taste," says Mayewski. But the pureness ain't even the half of it. Not that keeping your drinks cold is likely a problem in Antarctica, but these scientists sometimes drop a cube or two of drilled ice into their water—and it's easy to understand why:

If the ice is old, it will often trap air bubbles in it. Those air bubbles can contain carbon dioxide from ten thousand years ago or even a hundred thousand years ago. And when you put an ice cube of that ice in a glass of water, it pops. It has natural effervescence as those gas bubbles escape. You get a little a puff of air into your nostrils if you have your nose over the glass. It's not as though it necessarily smells like anything - but when you think about the fact that the last time that anything smelled that air was a hundred thousand years ago, that's pretty interesting.