subsurface oceans, we d like to think that with water and energy sources and chemical nutrients or the chemical ingredients that are necessary for life we ll get microbial life on other planets like that. jon: 128 degrees below zero at times or the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth, yeah, that would be pretty difficult conditions in which to work. i guess part of the problem is the simple matter that it is so cold they get this drill in there, and it freezes up again. i mean, the hole fills up again and freezes. true. and they ve got to keep this drill string or this drill bore open for over two miles of ice, 13,000 feet down to the lake. and then you ve got to penetrate into this pristine lake water without injecting, as was told us, contaminants into that hole. so it s a very carefully-planned effort or more than ten years to make it this far. next season we ll get actual samples out of the bore hole to see if there is bacterial life or something more complex.
celebrating a major breakthrough after years of drilling under very harsh conditions near the south pole. they finally have reached a giant lake buried under miles of ice. some are comparing the difficulty of what they have accomplished to reaching another planet. tom jones is a former astronaut for nasa and a fox news contributor, we ll be talking with him. but first, let s talk with robin bell, with the earth observatory, she joins us on the phone from london. so this lake was, i guess, only discovered in the last 20 years or so. it s the size of lake ontario, but it s buried under two miles of ice? right, exactly. under two miles of ice. even though it s -50 at the top, it s only, like, -28 at the bottom. jon: and the excitement, the scientific excitement about finding this thing or actually getting a drill rig down to it is that the water that s buried this has been buried for ons.
well, it s been buried for somewhere between 15 and 34 million years, that s a long time. jon: yeah. the russians have been pulling up these core samples. why has it been so difficult to do this? i mean, we ve known how to drill deep for a long time. well work the reasons. one, they didn t want to contaminate the lake, so they didn t want to get any of the drilling fluid into this pristine lake. the other thing is, it s the ice is really warm, and it freezes things up really quickly, so it was hard. jon: all right. so they drill down, they finally have reached the water that is not solidified, not frozen. what are they hoping to learn, what are you hoping to learn from that water? well, i hope they re going to learn what can actually live in these environments underneath two miles of ice, because it s kind of like the environment in outer space, like in the moons that spin around sat turn and jupiter. jon: so there are indications of microbial life in this water? well, we have