The research team plans to continue its tests for confirmation, including tests on more samples from Lake Vostok.
Lake Vostok was discovered in the 1970s by an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Russian Vostok station in Antarctica.
This makes Lake Vostok a place of great scientific interest, because the ice sheet above the lake provides the longest uninterrupted climate record known to exist.
The largest underground body of water in Antarctica is known as Lake Vostok, which is 250km (155 miles) long, 40km (25 miles) wide and 400m (1, 300ft) deep.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Secret rivers found in Antarctic
He said studies of microbes in ice above Lake Vostok remained "contentious" because of the issue over kerosene - of which the Vostok cores are said to "reek".
With an area of 15, 000 square km and with depths reaching more than 800m, Lake Vostok is similar in size to Lake Baikal in Siberia or Lake Ontario in North America.
Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: Russian researchers say they have brought up fresh samples of clear ice from Antarctica's Lake Vostok, a huge reservoir of freshwater more than 2 miles beneath the surface.
MSN: Undersea eruption gives clues to effects of climate change
This research could help scientists find out more about possible life in Lake Vostok, the largest of over 70 sub-glacial lakes on the White Continent, which lies more than four km beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
The problems of getting at Lake Vostok (and of preventing organisms from the surface from contaminating it) are, give or take the billion kilometre spaceflight required to get there, the same as those that would arise in any attempt to get a probe into Europa's putative oceans.
This unlikely sounding collaboration is taking place between researchers interested in exploring Lake Vostok in Antarctica, which is sealed off below several kilometres of ice, and planetary scientists, who see such exploration as a possible dress rehearsal for a future robotic mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, whose icy surface is thought to conceal vast oceans that might harbour extraterrestrial life.
Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, said the idea of using a small lake away from Vostok to test methods would now have to be looked at again.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Secret rivers found in Antarctic
But Lake Whillans is thought by some to have been less isolated than Vostok.
Nikolai Vasilyev, who led the team from the St Petersburg Mining University for the Vostok breakthrough last week, insisted that "absolutely nothing fell into the lake".
应用推荐