From the surface of the lake’s ice ceiling (Image: Alexey Ekaykin)

They’ve cracked it – again! A Russian team of ice explorers has broken through to a lake buried beneath nearly 4 kilometres of Antarctic ice. The lake has been isolated from the surface for 15 million years and could hold extreme forms of life never seen before, perhaps even offering clues as to what life on other planets might look like.

Lake Vostok is Antarctica’s largest subglacial lake. It was reached once before in 2012, when a Russian team finished drilling a hole some 3770 metres down to its surface. They claimed that water samples they obtained from this borehole contained DNA that was unlike known bacteria, suggesting they may have found an unusual native species. But the find is controversial, not least because the samples were contaminated with fluid used to aid drilling.

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The second attempt reached the lake surface at 5.12 pm on 25 January. The team used the same borehole down to 3400 metres below the surface, after which the holes diverge. This time, the team says they proceeded with extreme caution and are confident that the new samples they retrieved are pristine lake water.


Using information on the lake’s pressure and depth, collected in 2012, they calculated how slowly they needed to raise the drill to avoid a piston effect, whereby lake water suddenly surges upwards and mixes with drilling fluids, which is what happened last time.

The team was led by Vladimir Lipenkov of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute and Nikolay Vasiliev of the National Mineral Resources University, both in St Petersberg. They say that after penetrating the surface of the lake, the team let water rise in the borehole, where it froze. They then removed a core of this frozen lake water. “We hope to get these samples for analysis by the middle of May,” says Lipenkov’s colleague Irina Alekhina.

This article will appear in print under the headline “Vostok break-in”