Programme of AFO 2018

Lake Vostok has supposedly been covered by ice for more than 15 million years. The idea that a source of water might lie underneath the glacier appeared for the first time at the end of the 19th century. In 1931, H. P. Lovecraft wrote the sci-fi horror novella At the Mountains of Madness. In it, he plays with the idea that creatures which inhabited the earth before humans  are now buried in the Antarctic icebergs, and warns scientists to not conduct experiments that would lead to uncovering their mystery. In 1957, a polar station was built above the lake, the lake itself was discovered in 1974. In 1998, the deepest borehole through a glacier was made, measuring over 3.5 km. Scientists suggest that the lake might house ancient bacteria with an isolated gene pool of microbes which evolved 500 thousand years ago. In 2012, a Russian expedition went 3769 metres and 15 centimetres deep through the glacier and found a water reserve. The film by Ekaterina Emerenko shows the life of a group of scientists in these inhospitable conditions of the southern hemisphere, and deals with some of the legends about this particular area.