Flying Through a Crack in the Ice

"In October 2011, researchers flying in NASA’s Operation IceBridge campaign made the first-ever detailed, airborne measurements of a major iceberg calving event while it was in progress. Four months later, the IceBridge team has mapped the crack in Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier in a way that allows glaciologists and the rest of us to fly through the icy canyon.

The above image is a still frame captured from a three-dimensional, virtual flight through the new rift in the Pine Island Glacier."

via earthobservatory.nasa.gov

 

"The Thing" : A 140,000-Year-Old Organism Discovered in Antarctica's Ice-Shrouded Lake Vostok

"An ancient living laboratory of our planet's past in Antarctica may have provided a preview of what we can expect to find deep below the barren surface of Mars and in the ice-shrouded seas of Jupiter's Europa."...
..."No other natural lake environment on Earth has this much oxygen as Lake Vostok -- an oligotrophic extreme environment, one that is supersaturated with oxygen, with oxygen levels 50 times higher than those typically found in ordinary freshwater lakes."...   
via dailygalaxy.com