Professor Martin Siegart is part of a British team that plans to be the first to reach Lake Ellsworth, which has hidden beneath kilometres of ice in the western Antarctic for almost a million years.
Prof Seigert, the programme's principal investigator, will lead a team of British scientists who arrive in Antarctica next week in the hope of becoming the first people to reach one of the frozen continent's 387 underground lakes.
Lake Ellsworth is likely to contain bacteria, microbes and other simple lifeforms which experts believe will have been sealed away from the rest of the Earth for up to a million years.
Samples of water and sediment to be collected from the lake could reveal undiscovered life forms which existed on Earth before the lake froze over, and what the planet's past climate was like.
The sediment collected from the bed of the lake is expected to support the theory that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is currently on the wane thanks to higher global temperatures, has melted and collapsed in the past.
Prof Siegert, of Edinburgh University, said: For almost 15 years we have been planning to explore this hidden world. It's only now that we have the expertise and technology to drill through Antarctica's thickest ice and collect samples without contaminating this untouched and pristine environment.
Source with video: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...rets-in-ancient-Antartic-lake-expedition.html
Prof Seigert, the programme's principal investigator, will lead a team of British scientists who arrive in Antarctica next week in the hope of becoming the first people to reach one of the frozen continent's 387 underground lakes.
Lake Ellsworth is likely to contain bacteria, microbes and other simple lifeforms which experts believe will have been sealed away from the rest of the Earth for up to a million years.
Samples of water and sediment to be collected from the lake could reveal undiscovered life forms which existed on Earth before the lake froze over, and what the planet's past climate was like.
The sediment collected from the bed of the lake is expected to support the theory that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is currently on the wane thanks to higher global temperatures, has melted and collapsed in the past.
Prof Siegert, of Edinburgh University, said: For almost 15 years we have been planning to explore this hidden world. It's only now that we have the expertise and technology to drill through Antarctica's thickest ice and collect samples without contaminating this untouched and pristine environment.
Source with video: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...rets-in-ancient-Antartic-lake-expedition.html
