Strelna, January 28 The Russian government will make a decision on funding research work in Antarctica, Russian President Vladimir Putin said .
“I know that 2025-2027 will require billions of dollars in investments in this work. The government has not yet made a decision. But it will be made,” Putin said during the commissioning ceremony of the new wintering complex of the Vostok station in Antarctica.
The head of the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation, Alexander Kozlov, previously said that Russian scientists are preparing to penetrate into the subglacial Lake Vostok and study it, for this they plan to “include funding in the federal budget, literally in May we will submit this application for the next three years and for future years.” . The project is estimated to “take 18 years,” he said.
In February 2022, Russian polar explorers extracted an ice core more than 1 million years old from a glacier in Antarctica; it should “tell” about climate changes on Earth since the time of mammoths. The project is being implemented as part of the study of Lake Vostok and the Earth's paleoclimate in the area of the Russian Antarctic station «Vostok».
The existence of the lake under four kilometers of ice was proven in 1994. In February 2012, for the first time in the history of mankind, as a result of drilling the ice sheet, Russian scientists reached the surface of the subglacial Lake Vostok at a depth of 3769.3 meters.