MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

UK expedition plans to collect water and sediment from Antarctic sub-glacial lake

British engineers will next week set off for Antarctica to prepare the ground for an ambitious exploration project to search for life in an isolated lake three kilometers beneath solid ice, called Lake Ellsworth.

A year later, in October 2012, British scientists plan to collect water and sediment samples from the lake, which may have been hidden from the rest of life on Earth for up to a million years.

They hope to find species in the water that might have survived in one of the most hostile environments on our planet. This may tell them about the constraints for life on Earth. If they're successful, it raises the prospect of finding alien life in the oceans beneath the surface ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. But if they find nothing, it will reveal the limits for life on our planet.

They also hope that sediment samples from the bottom of the lake will yield clues about when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet last collapsed.

Scientists first came across so-called subglacial lakes beneath the vast Antarctic ice sheets back in the 1970s. So far a whopping 387 have been discovered.

'At first, the lakes didn't seem particularly interesting and only captured the imagination of glaciologists,' says Professor Martin Siegert from the University of Edinburgh, principal investigator for the Lake Ellsworth project.

'It was only with the discovery of Lake Vostok underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the 1990s that people thought there might be life in this extreme habitat.'

To get to the lake and to minimize the risk of contaminating this pristine environment, engineers will use hot water to drill through the three kilometers of ice, which the team estimates will take three days.

Once a hole is made in the ice, researchers will lower a sterilized, titanium probe to measure and sample water from the lake, followed by a sterilized corer to extract sediment from the bottom of it.

'No-one has ever built a probe to sample a sub-glacial lake before, so it's a new piece of equipment. And it all has to be done clean, to space industry standard. Designing the probe and corer, testing them and demonstrating they work has been challenging and has taken time,' says Siegert.

This first stage will involve transporting almost 70 tons of equipment in eight shipping containers 16,000 kilometers from the UK to a site above Lake Ellsworth in a remote region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The equipment will be transported by boat to Punta Arenas in Chile, then by aircraft to Union Glacier, 300 kilometers away from the Lake Ellsworth site. The engineers will then use a tractor train, traveling at around 10 kilometers per hour, to get the kit across the ice to the site.

The project is so ambitious it has to run over two Antarctic seasons. 'There wouldn't have been time to deploy all the equipment and do the science all in the same season,' says Siegert. 'Putting the drill in place this Antarctic season means we can hit the ground running next October.'

Lake Ellsworth is likely to be the first sub-glacial lake to be measured and sampled. The Russians are also attempting to collect water from Lake Vostok.

Scientists and engineers from the Natural Environment Research Council's British Antarctic Survey and National Oceanography Centre, eight UK universities and several UK businesses are involved in the UK-led project. They will use equipment that has never been built before.

Engineers from the National Oceanography Centre designed and built the five-meter-long water sampling probe, while the British Antarctic Survey and University of Durham worked with an Austrian company to design and build the sediment corer.