When thinking about Antarctica, most people picture a vast, icy, and hostile environment where very little can survive, and that is very accurate.

If you drill down deep enough into the ice, however, you may be surprised at what you find. Back in 2012, John Priscu, who was then a Senior Research Scientist in the Polar Oceans Research Group, explained to The Guardian:

“once you get down to the bottom, it’s warmer. There’s liquid water, it’s a much more clement environment down there. You just have to have a special set of organisms to know how to use it.”

There are, in fact, hundreds of lakes down below the surface, including Lake Vostok, which is technically the 16th largest lake in the world. These lakes are kept warm enough to stay liquid by the heat that is generated deep underground.

Sitting about 4 kilometers (2.48 miles) below the surface, it is this geothermal heat that can help to maintain liquid water even when the temperature on the surface above is around -60 degrees Celsius (-76 F).

The fact that these lakes have been under miles of ice for millions of years means that whatever life is in them has been entirely separated from the rest of the world for a very long time.

In 2012, Russian scientists were able to drill down and take samples from the waters of Lake Vostok. They were then analyzed for signs of life, which would have been on its own separate evolutionary path for millions of years. They found evidence that there are likely mollusks, crustaceans, fungi, and extremophile bacteria in these remote waters.

Scott Rogers is a professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He sequenced the genomes in the samples and talked about it with New Scientist, saying:

“We found much more complexity than anyone thought. It really shows the tenacity of life and how organisms can survive in places where a couple dozen years ago we thought nothing could survive.”

In addition to being an incredible find here on Earth, many researchers are looking at this lake and comparing it to other locations out in space. Specifically, it is thought that this lake is the closest environment we have to that of the massive water oceans that are under ice on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

If life can survive in this water here on Earth, it is entirely possible that it could have developed on Europa as well. Many researchers want to plan a research mission (likely unmanned) to try to collect a sample of the water from Europa, but the fact that it is so far away and under 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) of ice makes this very difficult.

This does, however, show that life in these extreme environments is at least possible, making it a very attractive place to investigate.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?