Lake Vostok

In the early 1990s, Russain scientists at Vostok Research Station had already spent decades drilling cores in the layer of thick glacier covering Antarctica. The deeper they went, the older were the specimens frozen in the ice, giving a sort of timeline of the earth. Yet at about two miles below the surface of the ice, the scientists encountered a thick layer of ice that was relatively much cleaner than the layers above it. When satellite altimetry and radar surveyed the area, the scientists were ordered to stop drilling at once. Below 2.5 miles of Antarctic ice is a liquid body of water the size of Lake Ontario! The water in this lake is about -3ºC, but under such pressure that it is kept in a liquid state and supersaturated with oxygen. If the scientists had tapped into the lake, the water would have burst to the surface with 4 times the force of a champaigne cork!

Furthermore, this body of water has been completely sealed off from the rest of the earth for thousands and perhaps millions of years. Nobody knows if there are any living organisms down there, but if the scientists had drilled into the liquid, they would have introduced surface bacteria and chemicals that could have obliterated any existing ecosystem. Many scientists think that the lake must be sterile due to the lack of sunlight, the freezing temperature, and the toxic levels of oxygen in the water. Other scientists believe that the lake must have life in it since a completely lifeless body of water has never been found on Earth. The ice above the lake has some very weird microbial fossils in it. Scientists are still debating how to explore the lake without contaminating it.