The most ambitious ice drilling project yet attempted is underway in Antarctica, into a lake that has lain buried under nearly 10,000ft of ice for up to a half a million years. Daily Mail takes up the story:
Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey are preparing to bore down to the subglacial Lake Ellsworth, deep beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet, to collect samples of water and sediment. Toiling under the midnight sun, they will endure temperatures well below freezing in a quest to discover whether life can survive in one of the harshest environments on Earth.
Should they find any organisms living in the icy depths, it could offer tantalising clues as to how life might look if it exists elsewhere in the solar system, such as in the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
The ambitious search comes after a U.S. team last week announced that they had discovered another lake locked for 3,000 years beneath 65ft of Antarctic glacier was teeming with living organisms.
But the Lake Ellsworth mission will drill far deeper, into a far more extreme environment, which scientists believe has been isolated for at least 100,000 years – and probably much longer.
Mike Bentley, a geologist on the team at Durham University, told the Guardian: ‘Extreme environments tell you what constraints there are on life.
‘If we find a particular set of environments where life can’t exist, that creates some bookends: it tells you about the limits of life.’