Drilling into Antarctic ice for 'lost world'

It’s a quest for the “lost world”. In one of the boldest-ever missions, British scientists will drill through Antarctic ice in search of life forms hidden beneath the frozen layer for more than 400,000 years.

A team of Antarctic scientists has been given the go-ahead to drill through a two-mile-thick sheet of ice that has sealed a sub-glacial lake from the rest of the biosphere for at least as long as humans have walked the Earth, reports the Sunday Independent.

They hope to find species that have survived below the ice sheet since it formed between 400,000 and two million years ago. Finding life in such an extreme environment would be one of the most important discoveries of the century, raising the prospect of searching for extra-terrestrial life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter where life is thought to exist beneath a frozen ocean.

The scientists plan to use sophisticated ice-drilling technology developed in the UK to penetrate the ice cap and enter the liquid-water world of Lake Ellsworth in west Antarctica.

Lake Ellsworth is thought to be more than 300ft deep with a floor covered in thick sediment. The scientists who surveyed it believe it is a prime candidate for sub-glacial life.
“It is a dark, cold place that has been sealed from the outside world and it’s likely to contain unique forms of life,” Martin Siegert of Edinburgh University, the principal investigator on the Ellsworth project, was quoted by the British daily as saying.

The British team intends to break into Lake Ellsworth in the Antarctic summer of 2012-13 with a pair of scientific probes designed to capture living organisms, or the chemical signs of life. It will be the first time any nation has explored these mysterious sub-glacial lakes.

Technical problems have dogged a similar Russian project to penetrate a much bigger lake called Vostok in East Antarctica. A healthy competition between Russia and Britain has spurred each side in the race to be first to enter a sub-glacial lake.

If these microbes do exist, they would almost certainly have evolved in near-total isolation from the rest of life on Earth, and for such a length of time that they might now be markedly different from similar life forms found at the surface.