Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009

Sub-glacial Antarctica

We haven't really been to Antarctica, we've only walked on top of the vast sheet of ice covering the continent. The interesting stuff is hidden beneath the two-mile thick continental ice sheet. We know from satellite images that the world's second largest lake lies beneath the Antarctic ice, as well as wide rivers, stony hollows, and soggy land. Antarctica features a vast network of subglacial waterways that that could contain previously unknown forms of life. A team of Russian scientists is currently drilling through the ice sheet in an effort to take samples from one of the largest subglacial bodies of water, Lake Vostok. Finding a way to get a human explorer under the ice will be considerably more challenging, but just as there was a race to the Antarctic in the early 1900s, there may well be a race underneath the Antarctic in the future.