Alien Life Clues in Antarctic Ice?

When a Russian team broke through 12,365 feet of solid Antarctic ice last week to reach an ancient buried freshwater lake, scientists eager to fill some gaps in Earth’s history were overjoyed. But they weren’t the only ones.
Seeing parallels between Antarctica’s subterranean Lake Vostok and suspected oceans beneath the ice-crusted moons of Jupiter and Saturn, scientists searching for life beyond Earth are eagerly following the Russian project.
They don’t expect water samples from Lake Vostok will hold alien life, though any life it contains may have taken a slightly different evolutionary path than what appears on the planet today. That’s because Lake Vostok, the deepest and most isolated of Antarctica's subglacial lakes, has been cut off from the atmosphere for at least 14 million years.
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