Lake Vostok is buried under more than two miles of ice  and Russian scientists are on the verge of reaching it, having narrowly missed in the last Antarctic Summer season.  If the Russian scientists do tap into this lake it will be the first time in millions of years and the world holds its breath to see what its there.

If you measure Lake Vostok by the amount of water it holds, it's the third largest lake in the world .

One of the delicious ironies of the story is that when the Russians built their Vostok camp over 50 years ago in Antarctica they didn't know what lay beneath. They had no idea about the lake.

Robin Bell, a professor of marine geology and geophysics at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, says the Soviets picked the spot because it was the Earth's magnetic South Pole says that they started looking at the ice beneath them to sample tiny air bubbles trapped inside.

"When they got to the bottom [of the 2.2-mile-deep hole] they suddenly found this ice that didn't seem to be the same," Bell says. They found giant crystals, it was a different acidity, and there were no gas bubbles in it.And realised that this odd layer of ice was actually from the roof of an enormous lake, buried directly beneath them.

"And right about then, the satellite imagery [surveying Antarctica] came out, and you could see this area the size of New Jersey was dead flat," Bell says. That showed there was a giant lake beneath Camp Vostok.

And from there the race to get to the mystery  lake beneath has been all on.

Is there life in the lake?

What would that life be, and how old would it be?

As Bell says"As I like to think of it, this lake hasn't had the wind blow across it for maybe 35 million years, but the water's changed every tens of thousands of years," she says. "So the water is relatively new. The lake is old." Its also very very cold there .Vostok station recorded the coldest temperature ever detected on earth .In 1983 the temperature hit minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

To get to take a sample of that water has been a very long process indeed. It took the Russian scientists more than a decade to come up with an acceptable plan for drilling into the lake without disturbing it. This Antarctic summer they started  drilling again in early January.

The scientists have come under criticism from some for filling the drilling hole with many thousands of gallons of kerosene and Freon to stop it freezing shut again in the winter. In theory the system is designed so that when they reach the water water pressure will push the fluid up the hole rather than letting all the kerosene and Freon into the hole and polluting it.But for some groups that’s too big a risk.

When the scientists left for the season in 2011 they still had about 100 feet to drill. So will they uncover the secret lake this year?

Seems so...read the next story