A separate expedition will start in October as U.S. scientists look for life under another system of lakes and rivers underneath the ice in western Antarctica.
The two forthcoming ventures will join a third, the Russian Antarctic Expedition that in February successfully drilled into Lake Vostok, Antarctica's largest subglacial lake, larger than Connecticut, under nearly 2.5 miles (4 km) of ice.
"It's a basic curiosity-driven question," said Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol and principal investigator on the U.K. effort. “Wherever we find water on planet Earth, we always find life and there might be a relationship between life and water.”
The extreme explorations will be a test to determine if water correlates with life, even under extreme pressure, cold and nutrient deficiencies.
If the group does not identify life, Siegert said the experiment would provide a major finding for the scientific community. [Stunning Photos of Antarctica's Lake Ellsworth]
"It would provide a limit where there is water and no life," Siegert said. "I can't think of another example where there is water and no life. We are pushing the envelope and seeing if there is an envelope.
"If uninhabitable, that might assist our appreciation of the likelihood of life on extraterrestrial planets," Siegert said.
A big, icy endeavor
Once engineers on the British team drill down to the lake, the researchers will have only 24 hours to sample the water, untouched for hundreds of thousands of years, before the borehole refreezes and reseals the lake.
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