Drilling to start on lake lost in time

Engineers have completed the first phase of a project to explore an ancient subglacial lake buried 1.8 miles beneath the ice in Antarctica.

The team towed nearly 70 tonnes of equipment 155 miles through the Ellsworth mountain range to the Lake Ellsworth drilling site.

Scottish scientists will return in November to collect water and sediment from the buried lake using specially developed 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 sea-level rise.

The project’s 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.”

The advance party, comprising four British engineers, braved temperatures of -35C as they transported the drilling equipment to the site.

On the final stage of the journey, powerful tractors were used to tow heavy containers of equipment on sledges and skis, forming a “tractor train” that travelled across deep snow and through steep mountain passes.

Scientists have been planning the probe for more than 15 years.

During phase two of the project researchers will use a high-pressure drill to bore a hole through 3km 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 about 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.

The lake is about 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.”