You’re sitting in a shed at the bottom of the world, drilling a hole through the ice beneath your feet. It’s unthinkably cold – about -95F – and dry. It’s a desolate, punishing place, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And two miles below, back through eons of frozen, undisturbed history, lays Earth’s final unexplored mystery.You and your team have been drilling nonstop for 36 days with a large ice-coring bit. You’ve plugged away at six feet per day, and you’re now about only five to 10 feet out. You’ve just switched out the large bit for a smaller, thermal drill that’s now melting away the remaining sheath.If boring through an unbroken 400,000 years of the paleoclimatic record isn’t enough of a boon to climate studies, the prospect of tapping buried water that by most estimates has been sealed off from man-made toxins and Earthly life forms for some 20 million years is certifiably tantalizing in that, as with stumbling into any hitherto hidden world, the potential for discovery and research is great. Vostok, as this relic lake is known, is over a mile deep and half the size of Wales. Kept liquid by geothermal heat trapped beneath the ice, Vostok is considered so alien that you’ll often hear folks speak of it as they would the lake conditions on some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Because really, who knows what sort of Level 12 deep-sea freakery is going down in the gloom?You’re about to find out. And you’re not sleeping, damnit, ‘til the first sample of Vostok water is sucked back up the chute.As captain of this expedition, you suddenly get word of an outside communication. It’s an American colleague curious to hear about the expedition’s progress, the morale and status of you and the others. Do you halt the final melting phase and respond? Do you take the call?Probably not. Well, at least not for a while. You’re on the precipice of the unknown, right? But you’re also in a race against inhospitable Antarctic winter conditions, the onset of which has you under considerable pressure to crack into Vostok, draw the necessary samples, and pull out to safety before all goes dark and temperatures plunge further. So yeah, everyone and everything else can suck it and wait.Read the rest at Motherboard.
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