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(Reuters) - The race is on to discover life in the most remote and extreme environment known on Earth.
Russia has set the pace, piercing through Antarctica's icy crust to reach a freshwater lake to try to find ancient or new kinds of life that have adapted to the extremely cold, sunless climate and may shed light on the origins of evolution.
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Scientists from the United States and Britain are close on Moscow's heels, sure that their technology will speed analysis of the depths, hidden away for tens of millions of years.
If life is found in the icy darkness, it will provide the best answer yet to whether life can exist on other planets like Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's satellite Enceladus.
"It's like the first flight to the Moon," said Valery Lukin, head of the Russian Antarctic mission, comparing the achievement to the U.S. space race victory over the Soviet Union in 1969.
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After 20 years of stop-go drilling, Russia was the first to pierce through 3,769 meters (12,365 ft) of solid ice to Lake Vostok - the largest and most isolated of over 350 known subglacial lakes, untouched for some 15-25 million years.
But the drilling technology it used means Russian scientists will have to go back to collect frozen samples of the lake water for analysis in 2013.
That leaves the door open for U.S. or British scientists to steal the lead. Both teams will be equipped with microscopes, enabling them to analyze the freshwater samples each expedition will bring up from two other shallower subglacial lakes.
Both will also head to the bottom of the world in the next Antarctic summer from mid-October this year until February; the British team to lake Ellsworth, the Americans to lake Whillans.
"They have broken through the ice, opened a window to that world, so we can all more or less follow suit and now do some real science," said John Priscu, a scientist with the U.S. Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) mission.
"Most of the drill is on a vessel right now, so it's on its way," he said.
"The United States program will have microscopes in the field ... We should know what is there as we sample it," said Priscu, who suspects an oasis of life may lurk under the featureless white, possibly teeming around thermal vents.
Unlike the U.S. and British programs, Russia will have to take a sample of frozen water from the lake home for analysis.
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