Ash Ruparell

It seems that Russian scientists are the first to drill into a huge body of liquid water buried under the Antarctic ice, they say there are about 300 similar lakes, this one is known as Lake Vostok.

There is hope that they will find some form of microbial life unknown to man, as these lakes are thought to be closed off to sunlight and the atmosphere for between 15-20 million years. They will now be able to determine if this body of water is isolated or one in a network connected lakes beneath the ice sheet.

The Russian Vostok station was set up on East Antarctic Ice Sheet in 1956 when they used seismology to find there was a body of water underneath the ice sheet and in the 1990′s British scientists used radar to confirm this.

According to BBC reports http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16907998

Lake Vostok measures15,000 square km and and over 800m, similar in size to Lake Ontario. It looks like the Russian scientists have a long way to go before they will find any answers to the questions they have.

On the other side of the Antarctic Ice Sheet later this year, The British Antarctic Survey (Bas) is to begin to drill into Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica while an American crew is setting it’s sights on Lake Whillans.

There are hopes from all the scientists that they will uncover some unseen microbes that will give us some insight into whether or not there could be life on other planets purely because the conditions in the Antarctic lakes could be similar to those in the liquid water bodies believed to exist under the surfaces of icy moons in the outer Solar System such as Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. For scientists on earth this could be the closest we can get to finding out if there is a possiblity of life outside of Earth.