Two miles beneath the Antarctic ice (two miles!) is a pristine, quiet place where life we have never seen could be living, dying, procreating, and evolving– untouched by human or outside world influence for perhaps 25 million years. 
The place is Lake Vostok, and with the same surface area as Lake Ontario (but with three times the depth), it is one of the largest freshwater lakes on the planet. The water temperature is believed to be 3 degrees below zero Celsius. Scientists are betting on the existance of subglacial life in the sunless and ice-encased world solely because of the heat provided from geothermal heat radiating from the earth below, much in the way sulfur vents at the ocean bottom are places of surprising biodiversity.
The paradox created over the past two decades, since the time of the lake’s discovery by a team of Russian drillers, is clear: Do we sacrifice part of our planet in order to learn about our, or another, planet?
The dominant justification for drilling into Lake …






