Today, the ice sheet provides habitat for many species of seabirds, seals and penguins.
"We really want to know how much water is under the ice sheet, " she said.
The ice sheet's recent rate of loss around 200 gigatonnes a year represents a fourfold increase on a decade ago.
As a result, the sea is eating away the edge of the ice sheet at a faster rate.
But it did not destabilise the ice sheet or provide a new reason to worry about rising sea levels.
In fact, another recent study posted in Science, concluded that polar ice sheet melting has been massively overestimated.
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Over the next four days we observe independent scientists working to understand why the ice sheet is melting so rapidly.
The indirect effect is that it can "pre-condition" the ice shelves that float at the edges of the ice sheet.
BBC: West Antarctic Ice Sheet warming twice earlier estimate
They estimate that there could be hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon stored in methane reservoirs under the ice sheet.
Nasa is coming under fire for an alarming headline in a news release warning: " Satellites see Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Melt".
Arctic glaciers including the Greenland ice sheet are melting and disintegrating faster than expected.
The panels are mounted in an inverted V, allowing them to collect energy from the sun and sunlight reflected off the ice sheet.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
This autonomous, solar-powered robot carries a ground-penetrating radar to study how snow accumulates, adding layer upon layer to the ice sheet over time.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
The lake's location in the heart of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet makes it one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet.
She said the technology carried on the plane will provide researchers a chance to address questions regarding why the ice sheet is changing.
We fly over and land on Helheim Glacier, a major outlet for the ice sheet which has sped up dramatically in the last decade.
But since the 1960s, satellites and aircraft with powerful radar devices have discovered more and more lakes buried kilometres beneath the thick ice sheet.
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The conclusion, combining data and models, was that the Greenland ice sheet is relatively stable in the centre, but thinning slowly at the edges.
Simons and his colleague Christopher Haig directed particular attention to the Greenland ice sheet, noting that the Antarctic ice cap is actually getting bigger.
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They all come from the Greenland ice sheet, a vast mass of frozen fresh water, hundreds of miles across and up to two miles thick.
Greenland's surface layer vaulted into the news in summer 2012 when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting across about 97 percent of the ice sheet.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
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.
But the scientists say this is unlikely to happen for several decades because much of the water is likely to percolate down the ice sheet and refreeze.
BBC: West Antarctic Ice Sheet warming twice earlier estimate
That information, according to the NASA statement, can help predict how changes in the ice sheet will contribute to a potential global rise in sea levels.
Without the flight measurements, "we would be blind" to changes in the ice sheet, said the mission leader, Seelye Martin of the University of Washington in Seattle.
The radar sends radio wave pulses into the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features, informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and ice layers.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
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".
Around 15, 000 years ago the Barents Sea ice sheet, which stretched from northern England to Siberia, disintegrated in perhaps less than 1, 000 years, probably because of warming seas.
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