Not Your Average Trip to the Lake

At the bottom of the world, locked under ice for hundreds of thousands of years, lie untold microbial and atmospheric mysteries, a time capsule of pre-human conditions on planet Earth. We're inching ever closer to being able to access this trove, but a cautious approach is required to avoid contaminating one of the planet's most remote and truly pristine settings.

Beneath a two mile thick layer of ice sits Antarctica's Lake Vostok. Discovered in the 1970s and since delineated with ground penetrating radar to approximate the size of Lake Ontario, the lake's surprisingly still liquid water and the lake bottom sediments, which have been sealed off for at least 500,000 and possibly one million years, have the potential to offer uniquely rich insights into planetary conditions that existed well before the arrival of the human species.

With this potentially great research motherload comes tremendous responsibility, however. No one wants to contaminate the lake. So, the competing international teams are balancing the urge to race to be first to the bottom against the priority to preserve. While ice core drilling typically requires oils and antifreezes, especially in harsh Antarctic conditions, the need to avoid contaminating this untouched environment is non-negotiable. One of the teams has developed an elegant anti-freeze- and oil-free solution that involves superheating the cored ice to melt their access to Vostok's liquid water.

We may need to wait a couple years for the slow-going approach to finally hit liquid treasure, but this seems a fair trade in exchange for keeping pure this potentially remarkable environmental and atmospheric archive.