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American scientists test their drilling equipment on Antarctica’s McMurdo Ice Shelf in preparation to drill through the Antarctic ice sheet into Lake Whillans in January. Photo: JT Thomas

A combination of ice-penetrating radar, seismic sensing, and laser altimetry has revealed well over 100 subglacial lakes hidden beneath Antarctic’s ice. Between now and the end of January, teams from the United States, Russia, and Britain are drilling into three of them.

The British team is preparing to drill into Lake Ellsworth, which sits beneath 10,000 feet of ice and has not seen the light of day for millions of years. (Update: The British team has ceased drilling this season due to technical issues.)

This week, a convoy of tractors will depart from the American-run base McMurdo Station. Those 13 tractors, towing 24 massive sleds of equipment and fuel exceeding half a million pounds, will cross 600 miles of ice before stopping at a nondescript spot 370 miles from the South Pole. There, almost in sight of Lovecraft’s “mountains of madness,” beneath 2,500 feet of ice, sits Lake Whillans, which has not seen daylight for 500,000 to a million years. Two kerosene-fueled generators, totaling nearly half a megawatt, will power a hot-water drill. Once activated in mid-January, that drill could bore an 18-inch-diameter hole into the lake within as little as one day.

At the same time, the Russians are drilling just above Lake Vostok, which sits under 12,350 feet of ice and has remained isolated from the outside world for up to 30 million years. The drillers at Vostok will extract fresh bits of ice, frozen lake water that gushed into the bottom of the borehole when the lake was first punctured last February.

The light that these explorations shed on Antarctica’s sunless waters will drive the monsters further underground.

The subglacial lakes will probably be found to harbor microbes, but not much more. Finding those organisms will reveal plenty about life’s limits, particularly, about the ability of ecosystems to survive in places with minimal nutrients and without sunlight as an energy source. This will provide clues to what life, if any, could survive in liquid oceans that lurk beneath many miles of ice in other parts of the solar system, on Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Image: NASA

The teams are sterilizing drill equipment to avoid contaminating the pristine subglacial ecosystems, using a combination of ultraviolet light, hydrogen peroxide, and water filtration. But their work is still bound to have impacts on the ecosystem of fictitious monsters.

Aspiring sci-fi horror writers needn’t necessarily forsake Antarctica altogether, says Reed Scherer, a paleontologist from Northern Illinois University, who is part of the team drilling into Lake Whillans. But monsters capable of ripping heads off or chasing down frightened geologists as they flee on snowmobiles will require more carefully though-out habitats. That kind of stuff requires a speedy metabolism. “In order for something to have a high enough metabolic rate that it would be scary to us, it would have to have heat,” says Scherer. Volcanoes sealed under the ice sheet could provide one possible niche, he says. “There’s lots of water and a heat source for things to have a high metabolic rate.” Aerial surveys of irregularities in the Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields have revealed a handful of possible volcanoes beneath the ice of West Antarctica.


But even as scientific insight banishes bone-crunching monsters from Antarctica, it could also lay the groundwork for new ones. Even just a little new information from the lakes could fuel a new generation of science fiction, points out Brent Christner, a microbiologist with Louisiana State University who will help to identify and culture whatever microbes are found in Lake Whillans this year.

Microbes could turn out to be the ultimate monsters in this scenario.

Jemma Wadham, a researcher at the University of Bristol in Britain, has determined that a large reservoir of methane may sit under Antarctica’s ice sheets, produced by microbes that have gnawed in the darkness for eons on the organic matter of dead ecosystems that were plowed under by glaciers. As warming causes those glaciers to thin, methane, a potent greenhouse gas, could seep up through the ice — billions of tons of carbon that could accelerate global warming in ways that models haven’t anticipated.

Drilling into Lakes Vostok, Ellsworth, and Whillans and measuring the gases, minerals, and microbes present there will help to test predictions of methane. Sci-fi writers inspired by the exploration of subglacial lakes may well make a new round of predictions about what Antarctica might conceal beneath its ice.

Some of those predictions will be wrong — others, like Lovecraft’s echinoderms, might one day turn out to be right.