A Primordial Lake

If there is one thing you would not expect to discover under ice, it is liquid water. But, as it turns out, that's not always the case. Scientists have postulated since the nineteenth century that liquid freshwater may lie beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet. They argued that because of geothermal heating, the temperature beneath the ice sheets may be high enough to melt the ice and generate what they now call subglacial lakes.

It wasn't until the 1970s that ice-penetrating radar proved the existence of these lakes, and it wasn't until the 1990s that they discovered the world's largest subglacial lake, Lake Vostok, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. But just because they knew it existed didn't imply they could get to it. Vostok was buried beneath two miles of ice, and it wasn't until 2013 that Russian scientists were able to dig through it and recover an ice core.

Lake Vostok had been locked off from the rest of the globe for 15 million years at that point, so no one knew what to anticipate. The Russian scientists confidently said that they had discovered unidentifiable germs that were wholly novel to science, but they later recanted after their samples were tainted with drilling fluid. Lake Vostok is still alive and well, however none of it is as "otherworldly" as some had hoped.

Found: in 1990
Location: the center of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet