Jan. 28, 2008 -- You won't find Lake Ellsworth in any travel guide. For starters, it's pitch black all the time and completely cut off from Earth's atmosphere. Yet some living things may very well call the subterranean Antarctic lake home.
A hardy, four-man team of scientists is camped out on the ice, trying to get the ancient lake to spill some of its secrets.
Ultimately, researchers would like to send a probe beneath the frozen cap to sample the water. First, however, the team must find suitable drill sites and figure out how to pierce the thick ice without contaminating the pristine lake.
The work will be arduous and expensive, but the potential discoveries have implications for a wide array of pressing issues, including climate change and how to search for life on other planets.
Lake Ellsworth is one of about 150 lakes buried deep beneath Antarctica's ice sheet. Radar data taken by instruments aboard aircraft show the lake underneath about 2 miles of solid ice. The lake itself is about 345 feet deep.
In addition to microbial life, Lake Ellsworth could hold records of Earth's past climate changes, information that could be particularly useful in understanding the global climate shift currently underway.
If the lake is connected to others in the region, the underground waterways could be a huge factor in draining ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet and a corresponding hike in ocean levels, said Martin Siegert, with the University of Edinburgh and the principal investigator of the International Polar Year project.
NASA is interested in the Antarctic lakes as test beds for future missions to Europa and other icy moons of Jupiter that are believed to harbor underground seas.
Antarctica's underground lakes "could shed new light on evolution of life in harsh conditions," Siegert said. "They can also help us understand the extraterrestrial environment of Europa."
The British exploration of Lake Ellsworth complements and competes with similar efforts by an Italian team studying Lake Concordia and Russian interest in Lake Vostok, the largest of the buried glacial lakes found so far.
The British-backed team has been using explosives for a seismic survey of Lake Ellsworth. Sound waves produced in the blasts travel through the ice and water and bounce back from the lake's floor, painting a picture of the body.
If the work is successful, the next step would be to use a hot water drill to bore through the ice and tap the lake so a robotic probe can be lowered into the depths to retrieve water and sediment samples.
"There is competition to be the first team to explore a subglacial lake," said John Woodward, with the U.K.'s Northumbria University.
Related Links: