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Michael Becker, a doctoral student at McGill University, was a scientific diver on an expedition to Lake Untersee, Antarctica.

I’m standing 2,600 miles from human civilization. I’ve traveled 80 miles overland across crevasse-riddled glaciers. The wind here can reach over 100 miles per hour and the temperature can drop to a blisteringly cold minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Standing atop the largest surface lake in eastern Antarctica, I stare into a single dive hole through eight feet of ice and into the 500 feet of blackness below. Down there, five square miles of nearly unexplored underwater territory await. I came here with five other polar researchers to go swimming.

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Lake Untersee is located in an area of the continent known as Dronning Maud Land and presents serious challenges as one of the most remote and isolated dive sites in the world. From November to December 2012, the six of us traveled to this vast wilderness to perform scientific dives in this permanently ice-covered lake.





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Previous expeditions by members of our group had discovered unique microbial life not only thriving in this hostile environment, but also creating underwater structures found nowhere else on the modern planet. Our mission this year was to return to this lake to characterize what, how, and why this life persists in such an extreme place.

Our team, the 2012 Tawani International Research Expedition, had been to this area of Antarctica twice before – once in 2008 and once in 2011. We are privately funded with major contributions from the Tawani Foundation in Chicago and the Trottier Family Foundation. Our leader, Dale Andersen of the Carl Sagan Center for Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, has decades of experience leading scientific expeditions in both the Arctic and Antarctic. The rest of the team consisted of two veteran microbiologists from the Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology, Vladimir Akimov and Valery Galchenko, a microbial ecologist also from the Carl Sagan Center, Alfonso Davila, a meteorite curator from the Robert A. Pritzker Center, Philipp Heck, and me.

I’m a Ph.D. student at McGill University working with Wayne Pollard to study the effects of climate change on polar deserts in the high Arctic. While I work primarily in the Arctic, I had worked in the Antarctic before and was keen on returning to the White Continent for a chance to see a new corner of this frozen world.

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If you’re going to make the effort to get to the lake’s edge, you want to make the most of it from frozen surface to frigid depths. Our Russian microbiologists, Dr. Akimov and Dr. Galchenko, are looking at microbial and viral communities throughout the lake’s water column. This involves sampling the water at different depths within the lake and filtering the water to extract your organisms of choice. On the Scuba side of things, Dr. Andersen and I are looking at what’s living at the bottom of the lake by collecting both biological samples and environmental data.

But our work here doesn’t stop at the lake’s edge as we have two terrestrial projects in the works. Dr. Davila is looking at microbes that grow on land in extreme environments in order to understand possible survival strategies for life on other planets. These hypoliths (living under rock) or endoliths (inside rock) are types of cyanobacteria associated with clear translucent rocks that permit the passage of light necessary for photosynthesis. And finally, Dr. Heck is coordinating the collection of Antarctic meteorites in association with the Indian Geological Survey.

The expedition requires a great deal of planning, experience and labor. It is true exploration in the scientific and literal sense. A reader of my previous Antarctic posts once told me that this trip wasn’t an adventure – it was an undertaking only to be regarded in the most serious scientific manner. How uninspiring. How could you not stand rapt in awe at the mountains around you, feel the bite of wind on your face, know the exhilaration of being practically alone in the most remote place on earth? How could you be here and deny yourself that?

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The person that comes to Antarctica and doesn’t feel that exhilaration of life is not truly living. This is a place where simply breathing elates the senses. Where our morning coffee is spent staring at mountains seldom looked on. Our daily work takes us into a lake that only five human beings in history have ever been. In the words of Helen Keller, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” I hope to show you over the next several posts that science and adventure are married concepts in Antarctica.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @Michael__Becker or on his blog, “The Dry Valleys.“