Antarctica’s interior was once believed to be too harsh of an environment to support life. Liquid water is the limiting ingredient for life, and as a continent that is 98% covered in ice, it seemed unlikely that anything could survive beyond Antarctica’s coasts. However, thousands of feet below the ice surface exists a newly explored environment that is changing the way we view the continent. From initial terrestrial observations made during the 1970s to more recent observations using satellite laser altimetry and aircraft radar, pioneering researchers have discovered over four hundred subglacial lakes hidden below Antarctica’s ice sheet. With the discovery of liquid water below Antarctica, came a new series of questions — Could life exist below Antarctica’s ice sheets? If so, how does it survive and what does it tell us about life’s origins? Likewise, what can it tell us about the potential for life beyond our planet? The short film, Life Below Antarctic Ice follows a team of researchers with the SALSA project (Subglacial Antarctica Lakes Scientific Access) on their mission to answer these questions through drilling 3,600 feet into Antarctica’s ice sheet and sampling from Mercer Subglacial Lake for the first time in history. Accessing an Antarctic subglacial lake is a difficult task, which requires millions of pounds of equipment and specialized techniques to avoid contaminating such an isolated environment. This short film highlights the tools and methods used in subglacial research, but more importantly, it explores the fundamental questions that motivate humankind’s efforts to understand more about life on Earth and beyond. We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about Subglacial Antarctica and while subglacial research has implications for our understanding of the Antarctic continent, it also has implications for our understanding of life in places that, not unlike Antarctica, were once beyond our reach.

Public Showings:

PBS Learning Media 

Antarctica Television Broadcast 

Ethnografilm Paris

Frozen River Film Festival

International Visual Sociology Association Conference 

PBS Online