Case file · Anomaly hotspot
Life found in Subglacial Lake Whillans
On 28 January 2013 the US WISSARD team drilled cleanly through 800 m of ice into Subglacial Lake Whillans and found thousands of kinds of microbes living without sunlight.
2013 CE · -84.25, -153.50 · status: official
The account
It was the first clean sampling of an Antarctic subglacial lake. The microbes live on minerals and ancient organic matter, and in 2014 the team described the ecosystem in Nature. It showed that the dark water beneath the ice sheet is inhabited, a result often cited in discussions of life on icy moons.
Connections in the atlas
- The drilling into Lake Ellsworth that failed
- The 'unknown bacterium' from Lake Vostok
- Lake Vostok, the lake under four kilometres of ice