h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Lake Vostock In All Its Glory - A1029557
Author: Researcher 225624 - U225624

Well, this entry is finished, packaged, tied with ribbon and not going to the Flea Market - hence the only option is to submit it for "Peer Review" (said in a suitably American and deep voice).

Ah, and just remember, the ability to talk brilliantly about a problem gives the consoling illusion that it has been mastered!

Oh yes indeed!

Very informative entry

The language is a little too 'flowery' for my taste but we'll see what everyone else thinks before going on about that...

Firstly - I've only ever seen Vostok spelt like that (without the 'c')... are you sure of your spelling?

Secondly. If it were me I'd change the order of the paragraphs round a little... wouldn't it make more sense to start off (after the introduction) with the descriptive passage

"Lake Vosto(c)k, a freshwater body situated in the East Antarctic, is 500m..."

_Then_ go onto

"In 1998, scientists from Russia..."

"The core sample has also..."

Finally

"Having the technological and logistical capabilities..."

and

"So why would we like (to) obtain a pure sample of these waters..."

and on to the end...



One other point... You don't actually state whether the method described for drilling was the method used by the team who drilled the core?

As with all my suggestions in this thread... please feel free to ignore them as you feel fit I won't be _too_ mortally offended





Whisky

Hi Whisky!

Sorry I took so long to reply to your comments, I've been very busy eating chocolate and, er, stuff!

Thanks for your comments, I do actually agree with your suggestions for the restructuring of the paragraphs! But to answer your final point, the method I described was only a theoretical way to get a pure sample of the water beneath the ice, not a method for merely taking a core sample (as was done in 1998).

I hope that clarifies things!

Good article, but I have two comments.

1.) I too have never seen Vostok spelled "Vostock".
2.) You say that "recent findings" have supplied data about the lake's depth, but you don't say how this was determined. You might want to mention that.

Wow! That must have been one heck of a lot of chocolate to keep you busy that long

It was! It was one of those mammoth sized (and yet indescribably delicious!) Dairy Milk bars! Mwhahaha!

Mmmm, my mouth has begun to water at the very thought.

Stop it! I'm on a diet!

There's no point being on a diet, they never work! Surely you've learnt that by now?! ("No, and don't call me Shirley!")

You may as well fill your life full of chocolate while you have the chance, because when you are reincarnated as a dog, it will be poisonous!!

Ha!

Hi Lachesis,

This article has a lot of potential to become an edited guide entry. You have chosen a very interesting subject, you know your stuff, and you have covered most of the major points. As an entry it is factual, based on genuine research, and does not contain any major content problems so prevalent in the masses of unsuccessful Peer Review entries. Well done - you have already gone 80% of the way.

However there are a few general points to make.

My main quibble is that the entry is a little bit impenetrable. You are using a lot of scientific terms and jargon which could do with some explaining, and you seem to be assuming that the readers will have a scientific background to start with. The people reviewing and reading this will be general (ie non-scientific) readers, mainly. Can you explain it better? It might be useful trying to think how you might explain it to a 12 year old. Here are examples - closed ecosystem, core sample, showing a low diversity, basal metabolic rates, etc.

Another point is your first paragraph. Its not engaging enough. "Paradigm of scientific principles" - ouch! I know what you are trying to say - ie the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and how the simple action of probing the lake might just change the conditions being measured - but to a lay reader it might just be too much. Maybe you should just talk about what it is, that it is a huge lake under the Antarctic Ice Caps, that it holds *immense* scientific value, but that extreme care has to be taken in probing its depths.

By the looks of it, you used Microsoft Word as your launching pad, and what it has done is to transform many of your symbols into illegible text such as – etc. Can you review all quotes, hyphens etc?

The last point is headers, paragraphs and GuideML. Worth a shot if you want to improve its accessibility and readability.

I might have been a bit hard on you here, but please understand that I stand by my first paragraph. I really think that your article (with some style modifications as proposed) is ready to go.

Best of luck,

Woodpigeon

I mostly agree with you Woodpigeon, although I had little trouble understanding the entry for the most part. I think we could aim a little higher than 12 years old

Still got any plans for this entry Lachesis? It's not far off being ready but definately needs a little more work.


Scout

Alright, alright! It's on my current "To Do" list, you must learn patience! :D

Patience? At four and a half months, this one's getting a little long in the tooth for a PR thread, although there are some which have been here even longer.

However, judging by where it's at now, it looks like it's going to be a cracking entry. As long as we know that it hasn't been abandoned and that you're going to finish it off then we won't bother you again for a while


Scout

I think it has been abandoned...

I think you're right

But they author hasn't quite elvised yet.

This one should definitely go into the Flea Market if the author does not return, as it is an interesting subject and someone might like to take it up.

For whoever does, I'd suggest removing the reference to Heisenberg. It suggests that the principle of not disturbing what you're observing is something to do with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which it isn't. The Uncertainty principle is something much more subtle, saying that certain things that we think of as properties of a particle do not actually exist as separate observable quantities.

It bloomin' well has not been abandoned! Honestly, I'm scheduling in little slots of time here and there to tidy it up a little and rearrange and generally brush it up, but I don't have a lot of time right now!

But as for the comment that was made about removing the Heisenberg reference, not having the name of the person that first stated that the very act of observing a variable changes it is very poor form, don't you think?! It's like not attributing the theory of relativity to Einstein.

Ah-ha! I see reports of your demise have been greatly exaggerated there, lachesis. Sorry about that!

We do though have a policy here in the review forums that if a researcher isn't seen on site for two months, then we consider moving their entries out of Peer Review.

Usually their work gets moved out and that is an end to it. Though in your case we had noted the quality of what you've written, and had you never reappeared here, someone else would most likely have taken what you had produced and then built upon it to get a finished version into the Edited Guide - of course crediting you as a co-author.



Now to the matter in hand...

I like what you've written so far, though there are a few areas that I think can be improved.

Firstly. This scenario isn't anything to do with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It sounds similar - ie if you go looking at something how do you know that that action hasn't in some way changed what what you're looking at. Where as Heisenberg was refering to the position and motion of particles at the qauntum level. So they are not the same at all.

Next can we have a bit of scene setting please.
Where exactly is Lake Vostock? What's the land around it like? How was it formed? Who discovered it (I assume it was a Russian)? What are the weather conditions like there? How come it got buried under so much ice?

Now onto the drilling itself.
How did this multi-national team come about? Who's paying for it? How long has it been in the planning? How long did the drilling take? What does ppmv stand for?

You've written a line that says, "...Underneath the ice, there is expected to be an environment that has never been in contact with humans and has evolved undisturbed...", I'd say that it hasn't been in contact with anything let alone just humans. How about changing humans to the rest of the world?



Well I think that that will do for now. It's looking good, and I'm looking forward to this getting into the Guide

I stand by what I said about Heisenberg. Heisenberg's principle is NOT that observation disturbs the thing being observed. It is that the thing being observed does not have an observable property.

What you're doing is more like saying "Everything is Relative - as Einstein said".

Hello Lachesis

This is an interesting entry: fascinating in fact.

I totally agree with Whisky's view that the paragraphs should be re-ordered. The opener doesn't attract non-scientists any further in at the moment. I also support Woodpigeon's comment that the scientific terminology is a bit un-reader friendly, although it is sometimes hard to make it accessible, but not patronising.

Are you hoping to make those changes?

Can I also suggest that once the paras are changed around, you think about putting in some headers, or subheaders, to divide the text up and to guide the reader into the next bit of the story?

Finally how was it discovered? If it has 4km of ice above it, how did anybody know that there was such a huge lake underneath?


F/b