Lake Ellsworth is likely to contain bacteria, microbes and other simple life forms which experts believe will have been sealed away from the rest of the Earth for up to a million years.
Samples of water and sediment to be collected from the lake could reveal undiscovered life forms which existed on Earth before the lake froze over, and what the planet's past climate was like.
The sediment collected from the bed of the lake is expected to support the theory that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is currently on the wane thanks to higher global temperatures, has melted and collapsed in the past.
Scientists also hope to learn how any life is able to exist in one of the most extreme environments on the planet – a clue which could help astronomers searching for life beyond Earth.
A similar operation being carried out at Vostok, a different underground Antarctic lake, by Russian scientists has been beset by delays and technical problems for several years, but the British team hope to drill through the ice, obtain their samples and bring them to the surface in a matter of hours.
The expedition marks the climax of a 15-year project by eight British universities, the British Antarctic Survey and the National Oceanography Centre, funded principally by a £7 million grant from the National Environment Research Council.
An advance party of four scientists led by Chris Hill of the British Antarctic Survey will leave Britain next week to begin transporting almost 70 tonnes of equipment to the site, so that the project can begin next October.
Their first battle will be travelling 16,000km to the site of Lake Ellsworth, which is about the size of Windermere in the Lake District but lies beneath 3km of hard packed ice.
Upon reaching the lake, they will use a specially-designed hot water drill to bore a hole down to the lake, and a probe the width of a CD to collect, filter and analyse the water within it.
A separate piece of equipment lowered down the shaft will be used to hammer into the sediment on the lake's bed and collect several metres' worth of sediment.
The drilling process takes about eight hours but the team of scientists will spend three months living in tents at one of the coldest and windiest places on Earth, with temperatures as low as -25C.
Prof Martin Siegert, of Edinburgh University, the programme's principal investigator, said: "For almost 15 years we have been planning to explore this hidden world. It's only now that we have the expertise and technology to drill through Antarctica's thickest ice and collect samples without contaminating this untouched and pristine environment."
Dr David Pearce, of the British Antarctic Survey, said uncovering a "relic population" that has been isolated from the rest of the planet for hundreds of thousands of years could "give us some insight into what early life might have been like on Earth".
Read more at The Telegraph
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