NORTH-EAST experts are eagerly awaiting the results of an ambitious bid to drill through more than 3km of Antarctic ice into an ancient buried lake.

The Antarctic team, which began drilling today (Wednesday November 12), hopes to find signs of life in the water and clues to the Earth’s past climate in the mud at the lake floor.

Professor Mike Bentley from Durham University’s Department of Geography, is leading the team back in the UK that will analyse the sediment samples brought up from the dark icy depths.

He said: “After many years of planning and design work by the full team of scientists and engineers, it's incredibly exciting to be poised on the threshold of exploring the lake.

“We look forward to retrieving water and sediment to see what they might tell us about life in extreme environments, and the history of the ice sheet.”

The science team thinks that unique forms of microbial life could have evolved in Lake Ellsworth’s extremely cold, pitch black and pristine environment and these may have been isolated for up to a million years.

If so the lake will provide clues about the potential origin of and constraints for life on Earth, and shape scientific thinking about the evolution of life on other planets. If no life is found, this would be an equally valuable result that would indicate the limits of life on Earth.

Using a high-pressure hot-water drill specially designed for the mission, a 12-man team has today begun boring a hole through solid ice into Lake Ellsworth on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

It will be a race against time to keep the access borehole open long enough to lower and raise two state-of-the-art instruments that will collect water samples from the lake surface to the lake bed, and a core of mud from the lake floor.

Sediment samples (mud) from the lake are expected to yield important insight in to the ancient history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and reveal vital secrets about the Earth’s past climate.

The team can only keep the borehole open for 24 hours before it refreezes to an unusable size.

Newcastle University physical geography lecturer Dr Neil Ross took part in two expeditions to map the lake.

He said: “Having spent four months of my life above Lake Ellsworth remotely imaging and mapping the lake and its surrounding sub-ice landscape, I am incredibly excited to hear what its direct exploration will reveal.”