The researchers have been studying the samples since they reached the lake and have found that an abundance of life lurks beneath Antarctica's blanket of ice. In this week's issue of Nature, Priscu and his team report finding 130,000 cells in each millilitre of lake water — a density of microbial life similar to that in much of the world's deep oceans. And with nearly 4,000 species of bacteria and archaea, the community in the lake is much more complex than might be expected from a world sealed off from the rest of the planet. “I was surprised by how rich the ecosystem was,” says Priscu. “It's pretty amazing.”
Samples from the lake show that life has survived there without energy from the Sun for the past 120,000 years, and possibly for as long as 1 million years. And they offer the first look at what may be the largest unexplored ecosystem on Earth — making up 9% of the world's land area. “There's a thriving ecosystem down there,” says David Pearce, a microbiologist at Northumbria University, UK, who was part of a team that tried, unsuccessfully, to drill into a different subglacial body, Lake Ellsworth, in 2013. “It's the first time that we've got a real insight into what organisms might live beneath the Antarctic continent,” he says.
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Samples from the lake show that life has survived there without energy from the Sun for the past 120,000 years, and possibly for as long as 1 million years. And they offer the first look at what may be the largest unexplored ecosystem on Earth — making up 9% of the world's land area. “There's a thriving ecosystem down there,” says David Pearce, a microbiologist at Northumbria University, UK, who was part of a team that tried, unsuccessfully, to drill into a different subglacial body, Lake Ellsworth, in 2013. “It's the first time that we've got a real insight into what organisms might live beneath the Antarctic continent,” he says.
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