Scientists Poised to Reach Buried Antarctic Lake and Discover New Life Forms

At a tiny outpost in the middle of Antarctica, Russian scientists are poised to become the first humans to reach a massive liquid lake that has been cut off from the sunlit world for millennia, and may house uniquely adapted life forms that are new to science.

Lake Vostok lies in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, and is buried beneath 2 miles of ice. The lake itself is likely almost as old as the ice sheet that covers it — around 14 million years old — and the water within could be 1 million years old, according to rough estimates. Scientists suspect that Vostok and other Antarctic lakes, long secreted beneath the ice, are home to cold-loving organisms that have been left to their own evolutionary devices for hundreds of thousands of years.