Engineers have completed the first phase of a project to explore an ancient sub-glacial lake buried 2.98 kilometres beneath the ice in Antarctica.

The samples we hope to capture... will be hugely valuable to the scientific community

The team used a tractor train to tow nearly 70 tonnes of equipment 249.45 kilometres through the Ellsworth mountain range to the Lake Ellsworth drilling site.

Scientists will return in November to collect water and sediment from the buried lake using space industry standard clean technology.

They hope the samples will provide clues about the earth’s past climate. It could also help scientists assess the present-day stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and implications for future sea-level rise.

“The completion of this stage of the mission is a welcome one – we are now one step closer to finding out if new and unique forms of microbial life could have evolved in this environment,”said the Lake Ellsworth Programme Principal Investigator, Professor Martin Siegert from the University of Edinburgh.

“The samples we hope to capture from Lake Ellsworth will be hugely valuable to the scientific community.

“This year we will complete and test both the water sampling probe and the sediment corer.

“Extracted sediment samples could give us an important insight in to the ancient history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, including past collapse, which would have implications for future sea level rise.”

The space-industry standard “clean technology” equipment has been specially developed to investigate Lake Ellsworth.

Scientists have been planning the investigation for more than 15 years.

During phase two of the project researchers will use a high-pressure drill to create a borehole through three kilometres of ice. They will then lower a titanium probe to measure and sample the water, followed by a corer to extract sediment from the lake.