Call it two out of three. A U.S.-based team announced today that it had successfully retrieved its first samples of sediment and water from the Whillans Ice Stream, a water body sealed nearly a kilometer below the Antarctic ice. The team is the second of three research groups this season to achieve its goal of retrieving samples from some of the continent's mysterious buried waters.
It's been a busy research season on the polar continent, with three separate groups attempting to bring back evidence of living organisms from lakes that sit deep beneath the ice. In December, a British Antarctic Survey team seeking to penetrate subglacial Lake Ellsworth was forced to pull the plug on its mission due to technical problems. Earlier this month, a Russian team nabbed its first sample from subglacial Lake Vostok.
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