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An American professor and expert of the Antarctic said he believes contact with a team of Russian scientists that has not made contact with colleagues in the U.S for seven days has merely been busy as they drill into a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice for 20 million years.
Professor John Priscu told usnews.com in an email that the crews have been working ‘round the clock’ to beat the end of Antarctic summer, which ends Tuesday. Afterwards, temperatures will fall to deadly levels.
He said: ‘I can assure you that they are not lost or out of contact. I never said the Russians were lost.’
The scientists are currently battling conditions of up to minus 66C at Lake Vostok as they raced to drill into a lake buried two miles beneath the ice before the weather closed in.
Base of operations: The Russians are operating out of the Vostok Station, pictured here, which opened in December 1957
Cross country vehicles deliver food and fuel to the Vostok Antarctic research station, one of the coldest and most inhospitable places on Earth. It has recorded temperatures of-89 centigrade
Hidden: A satellite image of Lake Vostok which has been buried under ice for 20million years. Russian scientists are on the verge of breaking through
Scientists were hoping water in the lake, the most inhospitable region of the planet, would reveal more about ancient life on our planet - but they have fallen silent just days before the deadly winter is due to begin.
Their radio silence has chilling echoes of classic horror film The Thing, where scientists dig up a buried spacecraft in the Antarctic ice, only to unleash an extraterrestrial horror within.
'I think we'll find unique organisms,' Professor Priscu, a microbiologist at the University of Montana, and a veteran Antarctic researcher who is on the trip told Scientific American.
On January 13, Mr Priscu said the team was progressing well, drilling 5.7ft a day. He said they had switched from an ice drill to a thermal drill to melt through the last 16 to 32ft of ice.
'This was the plan, but when you're in the field, things can change,' Priscu, who had been communicating with the group from his office in St. Petersburg, said.
'This has never been done before,' Priscu told OurAmazingPlanet. 'It's a one-of-a-kind drill, a one-of-a-kind borehole, and a one-of-a-kind lake, so I'm sure they're making decisions on the fly all the time.'
Harsh conditions: The Russian team, working out of this outpost over Lake Vostok, has only days before the temperatures become unbearable.
Geothermal heat under the ice keeps the lake liquid, and its conditions are often described as 'alien' because they are thought to be akin to the subterranean lakes on Jupiter's moon Europa.
The water inside the lake will have had no contact with man-made pollutants or Earthly life forms for millions of years.
Last year the scientists working in freezing temperatures at Lake Vostok came within ten to 50 metres of the surface of the 'relic lake'.
But the current intrepid team needs to leave by Monday, before already ice-cold temperatures in the desolate spot drop another 40 degrees centigrade.
Valery Lukin, chief of the Russian Antactic Expedition, said last month: 'We do not know what is waiting for us down there.'
The world is now waiting on tenterhooks to hear what has become of the explorers.
Robin E. Bell, a researcher at Columbia University who has visited the region, told MailOnline that the team is focused on getting their job done while they still can, and it is premature to fear the worst.
John Carpenter's The Thing: The 1982 classic centres on a group of scientists who dig up an alien buried under the Antarctic ice
