Marine Technology Reporter Blogs - image:scietificamerican/gaurdian

British scientists recently began an expedition to search for life in Lake Windermere, a stretch of water in Antarctica. Engineers and scientists set up camp on an ice sheet in West Antarctic. The team will use a sterile hot water drill to bore down to the subglacial Lake Ellsworth and retrieve samples of water and sediments that may have been isolated from the rest of the world for a million years. Scientists are interested to find if life can withstand such harsh conditions. If there were life to be found, it would have evolved in isolation for more than 100,000 years. The answers will further our understanding of life on Earth, and inform searches for life elsewhere in the solar system, such as in the ice-capped ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa.