Subscribe RSSA group of four British engineers recently returned from a 10-day trip to a desolate, windswept plain in Antarctica, scenery the stage for a project that could uncover previously unknown life that has been cut off from the world for millennia.
Scientists with the British Antarctic Size up are seeking to drill through the continent's thick covering of ice to a giant, hidden lake, cut off since before modern humans first evolved, which may outfit life forms invisible to human eyes. They could be unlike anything scientists have seen before.
"We expect to find microorganisms," said Martin Siegert, the cardinal investigator on the project, "because there's water and where there's water on planet Earth, there's life."
The lake, Lake Ellsworth , is 7 miles (12 kilometers) fancy, a mile (3 km) wide, and 500 feet (150 meters) deep. Buried beneath identically 2 miles (3 km) of ice, the lake has likely been cut off from any outside influence for several hundred thousand years, said Siegert, a glaciologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh.
