Lake Ellsworth project engineers deliver surveying equipment

16/01/2012

British surveyors and engineers have begun their mission to drill into a vast lake beneath the Antarctic ice shelf that has been cut off from the outside since before modern humans even began to evolve.

The advance team from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has started setting up their initial surveying equipment on the ice above Lake Ellsworth, to take initial readings and measurements. They hope to carry out the drilling of the two-mile-thick ice sheet at the end of 2012.

No one knows what to expect to find in the quarantined lake, but the drilling mission aims to search for signs of life in the lake and bring back sediment from the lake bed.

The team is setting up the equipment during the current Antarctic summer season, and will use GPS locators on each piece of equipment to make sure it can be identified under the blown snow before the drilling takes place in December.

A member of the advance party, the BAS's Andy Tait, described the extreme inhospitability of the landscape on the ice-covered continent.

"The maximum summer temperature is minus 20 and with a wind of something like 30 knots you can imagine the cold," said Tait, who said that the delivery of the drilling equipment was just a very preliminary part of the whole mission. "It is really harsh and working there with equipment means you have to use thin gloves - it is really cold."