Explorers prepare to drill into lost Antarctic world

The UK flag flies at lake Ellsworth where the drilling will take place later this year   British explorers are preparing to drill through almost two miles of ice into an Antarctic lake as they seek clues about life one million years ago. The team used a 'tractor train' to tow nearly 70 tonnes of equipment to the Lake Ellsworth drilling site which is one of the most hostile environments on earth as they prepare for the operation.
They will return in November to collect water and sediment from the buried lake using space industry standard 'clean technology'.
They hope the samples will provide clues about the Earth's past climate.
It could also help scientists assess the present-day stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and implications for future rises in the sea level.
The 155-mile journey through the Ellsworth Mountain Range took them three days to complete.
Scientists have been planning the investigation for more than 15 years.
The Lake Ellsworth Programme Principal Investigator, Professor Martin Siegert from the University of Edinburgh, said: 'The completion of this stage of the mission is a welcome one - we are now one step closer to finding out if new and unique forms of microbial life could have evolved in this environment.
'The samples we hope to capture from Lake Ellsworth will be hugely valuable to the scientific community.
'This year we will complete and test both the water sampling probe and the sediment corer.
'Extracted sediment samples could give us an important insight in to the ancient history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, including past collapse, which would have implications for future sea level rise.'
During phase two of the project researchers will use a high-pressure drill to create a borehole through 1.8miles of ice.
They will then lower a titanium probe to measure and sample the water, followed by a corer to extract sediment from the lake.
It will take around three days to drill through the ice and the scientists will have about 24 hours to gather samples before the hole starts to freeze over.
The equipment has been left one mile from the actual drilling site so that the location remains unaffected by the equipment's presence.
Lake Ellsworth is around 8.6 miles long, 1.2-1.8 miles wide and 150m deep, around the size of Loch Katrine in the Trossachs, or Lake Windermere in the Lake District.
Chris Hill, Advance Party Member and Lake Ellsworth Programme Manager said: 'This is a major milestone for the programme and we are delighted that our complex logistical operations were a success this season.
'Working within the short Antarctic summer season adds pressure to our time on the continent, which is why we had to plan two stages of the programme.'
The Lake Ellsworth programme is a consortium, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), between British Antarctic Survey and the National Oceanography Centre - and the UK university sector.
More than 400 subglacial lakes have so far been discovered beneath Antarctica's vast ice sheet.
A Russian team hopes soon to penetrate and collect samples from Lake Vostok in East Antarctica.
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