The ice formed as the water from the lake rose up into the whole due to under-pressure in the crack researchers drilled in last February.

“Initially, we saw completely unknown to us ice – an opaque, porous, bright white,” explained Vyacheslav Martianov, the deputy head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition. “But 20 meters after that we saw transparent ice, with the white ice frozen inside of it.”

Nearly a year after Russian researchers reached the unique sub-glacial Lake Vostok, the first sample of transparent ice from its water has been taken. The finding is of great value as it could reveal if the lake harbors life.

The Lake Vostok, isolated by 4-kilometer layer of ice for around the past 20 million years, has been of great interest to scientists since it was first discovered in the 1990s. Locating it became one of the major finds in modern geography.

If it turns out that some primitive bacteria or even more complex life-forms survived in the lake’s waters it could offer an earth-shattering insight into our planet’s past.