Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples.

Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years.

This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science.

"After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laborator...
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An ambitious mission to drill through 3km (1.8 miles) of Antarctic ice to a lake that has been sealed off for thousands of years has been cut short.

The team at Lake Ellsworth decided to call off the mission in the early hours of Christmas Day UK time.

They were unable to join the main borehole with a parallel hole that was to be used to recover drilling water.

The team is now "weatherising" the equipment and it is unclear when they will be able to resume the project.

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Once back on UK soil, t...
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Researchers found a diverse community of bugs living in the lake's dark environment, at temperatures of -13C.< Furthermore, they say the lake's life forms have been sealed off from the outside world for some 2,800 years.< Details of the work have been outlined in the journal PNAS.< Lake Vida, the largest of several unique lakes found in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, contains no oxygen, is acidic, mostly frozen and possesses the highest nitrous oxide levels of any natural water body on Earth.< ...
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If it was simply a weather balloon that appeared over an Antarctic research station, then why hasn't anyone confirmed it?

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But Ben Radford, writing in Live Science, suggests that's not unusual when video is sped up. "That's what happens in time-lapse photography: objects that are not stationary for long periods of time only appear in a few frames. ... There's nothing mysterious about it."

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"I have examined the evidence and have concluded that this is a craft and that it is most li...
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Washington Post National By Marc Kaufman, Published: January 31

After drilling for two decades through more than two miles of antarctic ice, Russian scientists are on the verge of entering a vast, dark lake that hasn’t been touched by light for more than 20 million years.

Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive “de-gassing” of a body ...

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