Tomorrow's edition of the journal Nature will include a paper documenting the existence of microorganisms living far beneath Antarctic ice. Special drilling and extraction techniques allowed scientists to tap into an active ecosystem half a mile below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where life was found in a lake untouched by sunlight or wind for millions of years. The discovery raises the obvious question of what other extreme environments might be able to harbor life on our planet, or beyond. 
 
 A team led by Montana State University professor John Priscu brought up samples from below the ice that contained single-celled microbes called Archaea, which convert ammonium and methane into energy to survive and grow. 
 
 “We were able to prove unequivocally to the world that Antarctica is not a dead continent,” Priscu said in a release. Similar expeditions have found sub-ice environments teeming with bacteria in recent years, but questions have been raised about possible contamination in the drilling process. The paper's lead author Brent Christner says with this latest effort, there is now clear proof. 
 
 “It’s the first definitive evidence that there’s not only life, but active ecosystems underneath the Antarctic ice sheet, something that we have been guessing about for decades. With this paper, we pound the table and say, ‘Yes, we were right.’” 
 
 The conditions below that Antarctic ice sheet have certain characteristics in common with known places on other worlds in our solar system, leading many to wonder if life might be more inevitable in those distant locales than previously thought. 
 
 Saturn's moon Titan , for example, is far colder than Earth, but plays host to vast lakes of liquid methane that could be a potential feast for hearty microbes similar to those living under the Antarctic ice sheet. Tidally-heated liquid oceans are also believed to exist beneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa and other objects in our solar system. 
 
 Some of the graduate students working on the mission to retrieve microscopic life from beneath Antarctica reportedly joked that they may have reached an early peak in their scientific careers. 
 
 “Some of the graduate students joke, ‘How do we top this?’ We can’t,” said Montana State doctoral student Alex Michaud. 
 
 Perhaps not. At least, not if they continue to limit their research to this planet. NASA could launch a mission to explore Europa sometime in the 2020s. ||||| Subglacial Aquatic Environments 
 
 Over the last several decades, by using ground penetrating radar and other remote sensing tools, scientists have discovered that under the massive Antarctic ice sheets there lies a vast hydrological system of liquid water. This water exists because geothermal heat flow from below, coupled with pressure, movement, and the insulating nature of the ice sheet above, is great enough to maintain some areas at the base of the ice sheet above the freezing point, even in the extreme cold of Antarctica. In topographic depressions there are hundreds of lakes, both large and small; some are isolated, but many are interconnected by water channels and large areas of saturated sediments, the water eventually running out into the Southern Ocean as the ice sheet becomes a floating ice shelf. 
 
 WISSARD 
 
 In order to explore one of these hydrological systems at the margin of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we have organized an interdisciplinary project to access the subglacial environment. The Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD) is using a variety of tools and techniques to explore Subglacial Lake Whillans and the nearby grounding zone, on the southeastern edge of the Ross Sea. Radar and seismic equipment is used to profile the overlying ice sheet and the underlying water, sediments, and rock, while GPS stations accurately track ice movement. 
 
 This season our target is the grounding zone, where the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet atop land meets the Ross Sea. This area is considered an important piece of the puzzle for our scientists interested in ice sheet dynamics. The work will help scientists assess the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, most of which sits below sea level. It is the last ice sheet on Earth resting in a deep marine basin and is the most likely player in any future, rapid sea-level rise. If the grounding zone is retreating or primed to retreat, rapid changes in ice behavior could follow over the next century. Work focused on microbial life, biogeochemical cycling, and surrounding geophysical surveys will also continue during the 2014-2015 season. 
 
 Our intentions are to have 8 days of science in the primary borehole at the Grounding Zone location mid-January. We will deploy all of the WISSARD tools during this period and recover sediment and water samples from the water cavity some 750 meters below the surface of the ice. We also hope to recover about 5 meters of basal ice cores at another borehole very near the primary hole. Image: Rachel Xidis/NIU. ||||| Researchers drilling through a half mile of ice in west Antarctica came upon a surprising discovery: a population of fish and other invertebrates living deep beneath the ice sheet in extreme cold and perpetual darkness. It's the farthest south that fish have ever been found, scientists said. The discovery was made earlier this month by researchers with Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling, or WISSARD. The National Science Foundation-funded team is investigating the "grounding zone" — the place where Antarctic ice, land and sea all converge — of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, roughly 530 miles (850 kilometers) from the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica's Ross Sea. 
 
 Using a specially designed hot-water drill, the team bored through nearly 2,500 feet (740 meters) of the Ross Ice Shelf — the world's largest body of floating ice, the size of France. They became the first ever to reach and sample the grounding zone. Submersible cameras sent down the drilling hole on Jan. 16 revealed fish and marine crustaceans living under the ice in dark, 28-degree Fahrenheit (-2 Celsius) waters, NSF said. 
 
 "I have been investigating these types of environments for much of my career, and although I knew it would be difficult, I had been wanting to access this system for years because of its scientific importance," Ross Powell, chief scientist with the WISSARD project and a researcher at Northern Illinois University, said in an NSF press release. "Findings such as these — gaining an understanding of the ice sheet dynamics and its interaction with ocean and sediment, as well as establishing the structure of its ecosystem — are especially rewarding. It's a big payoff in delayed gratification." 
 
 Researchers will examine samples of sediment taken in the grounding zone to learn more about ice sheets and their potential effects on sea-level rise. As for the fish, researchers want to know how the creatures are able to thrive in such an extreme environment, practically devoid of sunlight. The site is the closest to the South Pole where such marine life has been documented, researchers said. 
 
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 There is a lot going on with WISSARD!! WISSARD Science in the field is complete, and early findings are being... http://t.co/V1NzR5lgBh — WISSARD (@WISSARD_SLW) January 21, 2015 
 
 — James Eng
– A half a mile below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, in a lake that hasn’t been touched by sunshine or wind in millions of years, life goes on. A large US expedition called WISSARD, led by a professor at Montana State University, has unearthed a thriving ecosystem of micro-organisms after drilling through the thick ice to reach Subglacial Lake Whillans in January of 2013, according to a university news release. Considered one of the planet's final frontiers, the subglacial environments below Antarctic ice sheets have long been suspected to harbor life of some kind. Many of the micro-organisms found are single-celled organisms, called Archaea, that survive by converting ammonium and methane into energy in a harsh environment similar to those found elsewhere in our solar system, such as on Jupiter’s moon Europa. That has led scientists to wonder whether primitive (but hearty) life thrives there as well, Forbes reports. "It's the first definitive evidence that there’s not only life, but active ecosystems underneath the Antarctic ice sheet, something that we have been guessing about for decades," the lead author says. "With this paper, we pound the table and say, 'Yes, we were right.'" The findings appear today in the journal Nature. (A group of European scientists is already prepping for a mission to search for life on Jupiter's icy moons.)