Cold case

There are lakes in Antarctica. It might seem strange but it's true — bodies of liquid water, some of them hundreds of kilometres long — are locked away under kilometres-thick ice sheets. These lakes, formed from ice melted by the heat radiated from the bedrock, are the most isolated bodies of water on the planet: locked away for hundreds of millennia, with no light, frigid temperatures, and no linkages to any other environments.

But one Antarctic lake is about to see the light for the first time in its existence. In the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2012-2013, a British Antarctic Survey expedition will attempt to drill down through 3.2km of ice to the surface of Lake Ellsworth, a lake about the size of Windermere in the middle of the West Atlantic Ice Shelf — an unprecedented depth of ice drilling. Once the borehole is complete, they will drop a probe into the cold depths to sample the water, dropping it right to the floor of the lake to take a sample of the sediments. They will then take a core sample of the lake bed, returning it to the surface for study. And they will do all of this without contaminating the lake in any way.