Antarctica Is the World's Biggest Desert — And It's Hiding Hundreds of Lakes

Beneath miles of ice lies liquid water sealed off for millions of years.

Forget the Sahara — by the scientific definition, Antarctica is the largest desert on Earth, an expanse of extreme dryness bigger than the United States.

Under its ice sheet, radar has revealed a hidden world: hundreds of liquid lakes, kept from freezing by the planet's inner heat and the crushing insulation of the ice above.

The giant among them, Lake Vostok, lies beneath roughly four kilometers of ice and may have been sealed off from the surface for millions of years.

When researchers drilled into similar buried lakes, they found living microbes in the darkness. If life persists there, the buried oceans of icy moons like Europa suddenly look a lot more promising.