It WOULD or it MIGHT? Personally, I’d be willing to take that chance on mosquitoes. Aside from making people generally miserable they kill and maim millions of us by passing on bacteria, viruses, and parasites to us. Sure, maybe wiping them off the planet will bring down the ecosystem as bats have nothing to eat, and bat-dung bacteria die out and… oh hell I don’t know. But that is a risk I for one am willing to take.

Maybe instead stead when genetic science is improved by a couple orders of magnitude we can genetically engineer a mosquito that can out-compete existing mosquitoes and is repelled by the chemical signature of humans, so they just feed off the rodents and livestock.

It seems much worse than that. The extreme pressure in the lake would likely blow the freon and kerosene out, but the sudden drop of pressure could kill every organism in the lake, cause a rapid outgassing of the lake water’s stored gases, and then contaminate whatever gas content is left in it by exposure to the gases of our present atmosphere. Regardless of whether or not there is anything down there that would be killed, it would be a major catastrophe for science. Hence the self-sealing frozen ice phallus, which I think is an ingenious idea.

By “protect” it you mean never explore it at all? Protect it for what purpose. If we’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist it might as well not exist.

Calling exploration of this lake a waste of time reflects of profound ignorance of the state of earth science. That very Vostok core gives is absolutely invaluable data about the contents of the atmosphere over the last 400 million years. But that’s where it stops. There are no deeper ice cores. Yet just before the beginning of that 400 million years there were two GLOBAL glaciations — glaciations which no human would survive if they were repeated. That lake preserves the conditions — biological and atmospheric of the environment at the time of those glaciations. Despite anything you might have heard from Al Gore the science of the earth’s climate is filled with mystery and speculation. This science can only progress by finding new ways to extract information from the earth itself. And the answers that that science will eventually give may be crucial to the future of mankind.

to train personnel and test material in the frigid zones

to consolidate and extend American sovereignty over the largest practical area of the Antarctic continent

to determine the feasibility of establishing and maintaining bases in the Antarctic and to investigate possible base sites

to develop techniques for establishing and maintaining air bases on the ice, with particular attention to the later applicability of such techniques to operations in interior Greenland. (where, it was then believed, physical and climatic conditions resembled those in Antarctica)

to amplify existing knowledge of hydrographic, geographic, geological, meteorological and electromagnetic conditions in the area. [/quote]
This is a mission profile completely consistent with what I would expect for an army – or navy in this case – in peacetimes.