Last week, the Russian program to drill to Lake Vostok in
Antarctica reached the lake waters at last. The techniques used
have not been widely reported, and the different teams trying to
reach subglacial lakes in Antarctica advocate different
methodologies. In the Vostok case, water from the lake flowed up
the bore hole (that has been kept open with kerosene over the
period of the drilling), and this water will be allowed to
freeze and will be sampled as ice with a separate coring effort
next year. This way the scientists expect that nothing entered
the lake, only some water came out. A nice summary can be read
in the Nature news report about the coring that was published
yesterday: