Lake Vostok is Antarctica’s largest known subglacial lake and the 16th largest lake in the world by area. It lies beneath Russia’s Vostok Station in East Antarctica, its surface approximately 4,000 metres under the ice sheet and roughly 500 metres below sea level.
Russian geographer Andrey Kapitsa first proposed the lake’s existence in the 1960s based on seismic soundings during Soviet Antarctic Expeditions; its presence was confirmed in 1993 by British scientist J. P. Ridley using satellite laser altimetry. The overlying ice preserves a continuous climate record spanning 400,000 years, while the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15 to 25 million years. This extreme isolation makes Vostok a potential analogue for ice-covered oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. In February 2012, Russian scientists completed a 3,768-metre ice core and pierced through to the lake; the first sample of refrozen lake ice was retrieved in January 2013. The drilling—opposed by some researchers who favoured less invasive hot-water methods—used Freon and kerosene to prevent borehole freezing, which contaminated samples when lake water surged upward upon breakthrough.
Lake Vostok features in our Field Notes coverage of discoveries beneath Antarctic ice.
