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. On this episode, we're going to hear from a scientist who works in one of the least hospitable environments on Earth.

Trista Vic Majors has spent five seasons conducting research in Antarctica.

She wrote this piece about her team's quest to find out if there's life deep beneath the ice.

Her story gives us a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it's like to work in one of the most extreme places on the planet, a place so remote and unforgiving that failure seems imminent every step of the way. I woke up to the muffled beeping of my alarm clock. It was that really fast beeping

that happens when you ignore it for too long.

I hadn't heard it through my minus 40 degree sleeping bag or through the earplugs I was wearing to drown the noise of the massive generators that ran day and night to power our hot water drill and camp equipment.

I had been out cold for the past four hours, even though the inside of my tent was constantly bathed in a yellowish tinted light by the Antarctic summer sun.

36 hours ago, our team of hot water drillers had accomplished what none of us were sure

was ever going to happen.

They had melted a 16-inch diameter hole through the ice sheet that covers the continent of Antarctica.

This opened the very first portal into another world, a shallow lake filled with brownish water,

buried beneath a half a mile of ice.

From the time that borehole opened, we had only 96 hours to sample the water and mud of that shallow pond, which is called subglacial Lake Willans.

The clock was already ticking towards winter when the so-called polar night would make access impossible.

In Antarctica, it's dark 24-7 in the winter.

I reminded myself of that as I tried to shake off the groginess.

I looked at the time.

Four o'clock.

Was that a.m. or p.m.?

...