THE clank of hammers, the grind of machinery and the crackle of welding torches echo in a seemingly endless shed at the Arctech Helsinki shipyard in Finland.

Since June, about 200 workers have been assembling the skeleton of the Baltika, the first of a new breed of ice-breaking ship designed to cut a wide path through Arctic ice with its asymmetric hull. On completion early next year, Baltika will enter service under the Russian flag, clearing the way for large ships bound for ports like St Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland.

Baltika will be in the vanguard of global shipping’s rush into the Arctic. Thinning ice is already luring vessels to the waters off Russia’s northern coast, which offer a shorter route from Europe to Asia than the typical passage through the Suez Canal. In 2012, 46 ships were granted passage by Russia’s Administration. This year, the .

For now, ice is the biggest hurdle to development of the route, and also hinders frigid ports in Finland and neighbouring Russia. Icebreakers can be hired as escorts, but they are typically only able to punch channels about 25 metres wide – too narrow for the larger classes of container ships. Doubling the escort widens the channel, but at greater cost.

At 76 metres long by 20 metres wide, the Baltika will use its unique asymmetric hull to cut swathes through the ice. Each of the three engine pods mounted around the hull can rotate to deliver thrust in any direction. These azimuth thrusters allow the vessel to swing round and attack the ice at an angle of up to 30 degrees (see diagram). Meanwhile, fuel and bilge water is pumped around inside the hull to shift the vessel’s centre of gravity for optimal ice-breaking. The idea is for the ship to be able to make headway in ice up to 60 centimetres thick, while carving a channel 50 metres wide – enough for large container ships to follow.

“Rotating thrusters allow the asymmetric ship to swing round and attack the ice at an angle”

The asymmetric hull has a major drawback, though. Modelling shows that it will pitch and roll irregularly at sea, and pilots will have to learn how to sail the vessel to compensate. “There are lots of different operational modes for the ship, all of which had to be addressed when working out how to use the power from each of the three thrusters,” says Mika Willberg, project manager at Arctech. “But, finally, after having trained on a simulator, you end up being able to drive this vessel with a joystick system.”

The Baltika is expected to stay in the Gulf of Finland, but subsequent boats of its design could help open the Northern Sea Route to global shipping traffic. That includes oil and gas resources from the Arctic, which Russia is keen to develop.

Should such shipments go awry, Baltika will also come equipped to help clean up oil spills. The vessel will boast an advanced petroleum-recovery system suitable for operation even in heavy seas. “Again, this is made possible with the ship moving sideways, against the spill, and sucking the oil into a 900-cubic-metre internal tank, which can separate the oil from the water,” says Willberg.

In the shipyard, the Baltika is still mostly raw steel. Huge hull components made in Kaliningrad, Russia, will soon be outfitted and joined together. If all goes to plan, Baltika will be in the water by November and breaking Arctic ice before next year’s spring thaw.

After years of speculation we are about to find out, as a Russian drill nears the lake. The , the body set up to preserve the continent, has approved the to ensure the reservoir is not polluted. Researchers from Russia’s (AARI) in St Petersburg expect to reach the water in late January.

The AARI’s Valery Lukin says they have devised a clever method for sampling the lake without contaminating it. “Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again,” Lukin says. The following season, the team will go back to bore in that frozen water, take the sample out and analyse its contents.

“The Russians really did a good job in giving answers to all the fears raised that their actions would contaminate this unexplored environment,” says Manfred Reinke, head of the ATS.

Unknown life?

Covering an area of 16 square kilometres, and reaching down 1050 metres, Lake Vostok is isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes found in Antarctica. Anything living in the lake is either very old, or – potentially – an unknown form of life.

The Russian science team based at Vostok station have been ready to drill into ice above the lake since 1998. But the ATS wouldn’t give the go-ahead until it was satisfied that a thorough environmental assessment had been conducted to avoid any pollution of the pristine reservoir.

“The bottom of the new borehole lies at 3650 metres, more or less 100 metres above the lake,” says Lukin. “Beginning late December, we will first use a mechanical drill and the usual kerosene-freon to reach 3725 metres. Then, a newly developed thermal drill head, using a clean silicon-oil fluid and equipped with a camera, will go through the last 20 to 30 metres of ice.”

of the French Polar Institute Paul Emile Victor in Brest, France, doubts the Russians will penetrate the lake during this Antarctic summer. “In respect to the Antarctic Treaty, they should wait 60 days after having submitted their CEE, which would bring them almost to the end of the Antarctic season.”

Lukin admits time is short but says that since the exact location of the ice-water boundary is not known, “the breakthrough could well happen in a few weeks.”

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We could be witnessing the first signs of a “shadow biosphere” – a parallel form of life on Earth with a different biochemistry to all others. Bacteria that grow without phosphorus, one of the six chemical elements thought to be essential for life, have been isolated from California’s Mono Lake. Instead of phosphorus, the bacteria substitute the deadly poison arsenic.

“Life as we know it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine,” says of and the in Menlo Park, California.

Wolfe-Simon’s team took mud containing bacteria from the arsenic-rich and grew them in ever decreasing concentrations of phosphorus. Their rationale was that since in the periodic table, and shares many of its chemical properties and is even used as a source of energy for some bacteria, the bugs would be able to swap one for the other. That is just what happened.

“After one year, they are still alive and well,” says of Arizona State University in Tempe. Not only that, the team showed that this ability was incorporated deep into the molecular building-blocks of the bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the salt-loving Halomonadaceae family, right down to the DNA.

Life’s backbone

Until now, all known life has been built around the six major chemical elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur – known as CHNOPS – which make up proteins, lipids and DNA. In all normal life forms, phosphorus is a major part of the backbone of the genetic material.

“It’s the first time such a chemical substitution has been shown for DNA,” says of the University of Strasbourg, France, who was not part of the team. “Possibly, it’s a relic of an ancestral metabolism that was supplanted during evolution because using phosphorus was more stable and less toxic.”

Despite surviving on arsenic for a year, the bacteria would still “prefer” to grow using phosphorus: biomolecules react more efficiently in water and seem to be more stable when constructed with phosphorus than arsenic. They only substitute arsenic if there is no alternative.

, a chemist from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida, who works on alternative forms of DNA, is sceptical that the bacteria really do contain arsenic. “I doubt these results,” he says, since in order to measure the modified DNA it has to be put into a water-containing gel, which would rapidly dissolve any arsenate molecules. Any hypothesis that arsenate might replace phosphate in biomolecules must take this into account, he says.

Shadow biosphere

Davies says that future work will address the stability-in-water issue, but argues that the discovery underlines the need to look further for the first true representatives of alternate life forms in Earth’s shadow biosphere.

Where to search? Extreme and isolated ecological niches such as dry deserts or cold plateaus, boreholes in the mantle or deeper, contaminated lakes or deep-sea hydrothermal vents would be a good target. “It could also be that this ‘weird life’ is all around us, intermingled with carbon-based life. If so, it’s going to be hard to detect, as we would have to find a way to first filter everything out,” says Davies.

Arsenic-bacteria have implications for possible extra-terrestrial life, too. “If life started in more than one manner on our planet, it would be very peculiar to believe that other places in the universe are not teeming with it,” says Davies. He says we should think carefully about which chemical elements to follow to find it.

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The experiment to probe the early moments of the universe started up on 7 November, smashing together the nuclei of lead atoms inside the LHC’s circular tunnel to produce incredibly dense and hot fireballs of subatomic particles at over 10 trillion °C. The idea behind ALICE is to recreate the exotic, primordial “soup of particles” known as quark-gluon plasma that appeared microseconds after the universe’s birth. Gluons and quarks went on to become the constitutive “bricks” of neutrons and protons inside atomic nuclei.

Many models have suggested that the flow of particles from these subatomic fireworks produced in high-energy nuclear collisions should behave like a gas and not a liquid. “These observations keep surprising us,” says of the University of Birmingham, UK, a member of the ALICE team.

A further surprise was the density of subatomic particles created by the smash. One major school of thought suggests there is an upper limit on how many interacting gluons can be packed into a given volume: when this saturation point is reached during a collision, no more new debris particles should therefore be produced.

But to the surprise of the ALICE scientists, the lead ions’ mini big bang produced more subatomic particles than expected. “This means that if an upper limit exists, it has not yet been reached at the energies used at LHC,” says Evans.

Gold soup

This is especially significant, because ALICE has used the highest energies yet. It used energies 13 times higher those used in similar experiments in 2005 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.

The Brookhaven experiments smashed nuclei of gold atoms together to probe the same questions as ALICE. They delivered the puzzling finding that the primordial soup formed after the collision appeared to flow like a near-perfect liquid with almost no viscosity.

Energies up

Some models had indicated that if higher energies were used, viscosity values – resistance to flow of a fluid – would indicate the presence of a gas. “At the time, the RHIC results already surprised us,” says Evans. “But our data still seem to show that the quark-gluon plasma flows like a superhot liquid.”

He adds, however, that it is too early to draw any new interpretation about the structure of the early universe.

“Those results are impressive,” comments John Ellis, a theorist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. “But these are early days. We knew it would be very difficult to find hints of a gaseous form of quark-gluon plasma. Maybe it all started as a gas, and then its expansion, and therefore cooling, led it to become a liquid.”

“We have to look deeper into the details of the collisions to be sure,” admits David Evans, who is already looking forward to the LHC’s next phase in 2013, when the possible collision energies will be doubled.

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