Having just completed the tortuous 48-hour journey from the South Pole to the US west coast, John Priscu is suffering from more than his fair share of jet lag. But his tiredness can’t mask the excitement in his voice. After weeks of intense field work in Antarctica, he and his team have become the first to find life in a lake trapped under the frozen continent’s ice sheet.
“Lake Whillans definitely harbours life,” he says. “It appears that there lies a large wetland ecosystem under Antarctica’s ice sheet, with an active microbiology.”
The lake in question is a 60-square-kilometre body of water that sits on the edge of the Ross Ice shelf in West Antarctica. To reach it, Priscu, a glaciologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, and his team had to drill down 800 metres of ice.
via Nature
Image: Drillers found a microbial ecosystem hiding under 800 metres of ice, at the end of this
50-centimetre-wide borehole in the Antarctic ice sheet. ALBERTO BEHAR/JPL/ASU & NSF/NASA
