The lake's location in the heart of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet makes it one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet.
But the volume of the Martian north polar cap is less than half that of the Greenland ice cap, and about four percent of the Antarctic ice sheet.
In their Nature paper, the authors comment that their "findings suggest that the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be a neglected but important component of the global methane budget".
The team also hopes to take samples of mud from the bottom of the lake, to better understand the geological history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Earth's past climate.
MSN: Mission to drill into buried Antarctic lake hits a snag
Scientists note that current climate-change models predict that some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet will grow while other parts will shrink, and that parts of the Greenland ice also will melt.
About 14 million years ago, a period of climate change caused the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, which averages one mile in thickness and gets up to three miles thick in some parts.
Several hours from the South Pole, in the barren expanses of western Antarctica, a small team of American researchers has just finished their second field-season with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core project.
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.
This means that we can expect more than the one-meter sea level rise projected for 2100, a fact that the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, as well as strong indications that the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet is also melting, strongly support.
The plan to drill through the Antarctic ice-sheet to sample the hidden waters of Lake Ellsworth in December involves BAS and NOC and other bodies and is led by a professor from Bristol University.
Mechanisms on the verge of being instigated include loss of Arctic sea ice, shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet, loss of Antarctic ice shelves, and shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheets.
Furthermore, the high-quality dating of the WAIS Divide core will make it easy to correlate with cores from Greenland's ice sheet, allowing for a tighter coupling of records from the Artic and the Antarctic.
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