Lake Vostok and Subglacial Exploration

Beneath Vostok Station, the coldest place on Earth, Soviet scientists drilled for ancient ice. But in the 1960s, geographer Andrei Kapitsa saw something strange in the data. Seismic soundings from deep below the ice sheet were not reflecting from solid rock. Instead, they were unusually flat and bright, just as they would be if they were bouncing off a vast surface of liquid water. Kapitsa hypothesized that a massive freshwater lake was trapped miles down, melted by the Earth’s geothermal heat and insulated by the crushing weight of the ice above. For decades, it was a tantalizing theory, a ghost lake hidden under four kilometers of ice. Proving its existence would require a new generation of technology.