Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There.

This is a podcast about the outdoors, from your window box and garden to the fields on the edge of town, to the forests, prairies, seashores, and wilderness.

On the show, we explore our relationship with nature, through stories, interviews, essays, and even some fiction.

We travel around the U.S. and the world with tales of love and heartbreak, passion and adversity,

desperation, and triumph. A few months ago, we had a piece on the show by a scientist named Trista Vic Majors.

She was talking about her team's research in Antarctica, trying to find out if there's life

deep beneath the ice. After the episode aired, several listeners asked to know more about

the discoveries that Trista and her colleagues had made. So we invited her back on the show.

She joins us via Skype.

And I should say that if you haven't heard Trista's original episode, you might want to go back

and listen to that before you keep going with this one.

Music Okay, so as you may remember, Trista's team was looking for life in a so-called subglacial lake.

In other words, a lake that's underneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

There are hundreds of these lakes, and although no one had ever sampled water from them,

Trista says scientists had reason to believe that there could be life in the lakes.

So far, everywhere that we have looked that there is water and a source of nutrients you find life.

And, you know, just based on that idea, you would think there should be life there.

And other researchers had also been able to retrieve some ice samples from above one of the

other subglacial lakes called Lake Vostok, which is a huge

lake. And they found microbial cells in that ice that presumably had come from the lake at some

point. So we had a few different things pointing us in that direction. So a source of nutrients.

Antarctica strikes me as sort of a wasteland. Where would nutrients be coming from for a lake deep underneath the ice? Right. Yeah, I mean, from the surface,

...