In a first-of-its-kind feat¹ of science and engineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team has successfully drilled through 800 meters (2,600 feet) of Antarctic ice to reach a subglacial（冰川下的） lake and retrieve² water and sediment³ samples that have been isolated⁴ from direct contact with the atmosphere for many thousands of years. Scientists and drillers with the interdisciplinary Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD) announced Jan. 28 local time (U.S. stations in Antarctica keep New Zealand time) that they had used a customized clean hot-water drill to directly obtain samples from the waters and sediments⁵ of subglacial Lake Whillans.

 

The samples may contain microscopic⁶ life that has evolved uniquely to survive in conditions of extreme cold and lack of light and nutrients⁷. Studying the samples may help scientists understand not only how life can survive in other extreme ecosystems⁸ on Earth, but also on other icy worlds in our solar system.

 

The WISSARD teams' accomplishment⁹, the researchers said, "hails a new era in polar science, opening a window for future interdisciplinary science in one of Earth's last unexplored frontiers."

 

A massive ice sheet, almost two miles thick in places, covers more than 95 percent of the Antarctic continent. Only in recent decades have airborne and satellite radar¹⁰ and other mapping technologies revealed that a vast, subglacial system of rivers and lakes exists under the ice sheet. Lakes vary in size, with the largest being Vostok Subglacial Lake in the Antarctic interior that is comparable in size to Lake Ontario.

 

WISSARD targeted a smaller lake (1.2 square miles in area), where several lakes appear linked to each other and may drain to the ocean, as the first project to obtain clean, intact samples of water and sediments from a subglacial lake.

 

The achievement is the culmination¹¹ of more than a decade of international and national planning and 3 1/2 years of project preparation by the WISSARD consortium of U.S. universities and two international contributors. There are 13 WISSARD principal investigators¹² representing eight different U.S. institutions.

 

NSF, which manages the United States Antarctic Program, provided over $10 million in grants as part of NSF's International Polar Year portfolio¹³ to support the WISSARD science and development of related technologies.

 

The National Aeronautics¹⁴ and Space Administration's (NASA) Cryospheric Sciences Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric¹⁵ Administration (NOAA), and the private Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation also provided support for the project.

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