Antarctica hates life. As a frozen desert seeing less than 200 millimeters of precipitation a year, and nights that last almost half that time, it's one of last places on Earth any given organism would want to call home. Even though penguins and seals straddle the coast, and mosses cling to the few places without snow, there are places even the most tenaciously masochistic can't live.
Known as the McMurdo dry valleys, these deserts along the flanks of the Rosse ice shelf have more in common with Mars than Earth. Any snow falling here is either vaporized in the sun, or blasted away by winds crashing down from the south pole. What little life ventures its way down here are either scientists or lost seals. The latter usually shrivels into a bony raisin before ever getting the chance to use its research grant.
It's as hostile of an environment as it gets on Earth, so much so that most bacteria gave up on living here in favor of boiling geysers and tar pits further north. In 2013, this was proven by a group of Canadian researchers digging around in the University Valley section. What they found deep beneath the soil at the permafrost layer was nothing. This technically means that for the duration of one expedition, Canadians were the largest and only animals in University Valley.
That's not to say there's no life in the dry valleys. Tucked inside the cracks and pores of solid rock are photosynthetic bacteria. The rocks are safe from the wind, and hold more moisture than the valley they rest in. Bacteria that don't want to live in a valley where rocks are the safest location, choose instead to live very close to it.
Scientists just aren't really sure how they survive without sunlight, or abundant chemical energy. Essentially, the life hanging out in the dry valleys really shouldn't be hanging on as it is. Hypothesis range from the bacteria living on something scientists haven't found in the lake, or that the little guys are in the middle of a multi millennia nap.
The discovery of life existing at the bottom of the lake has led to more ambitious projects in the search for more hiding places under the permafrost. In 2015, researchers unveiled the Sky TEM, a helicopter mounted scanner capable of seeing what's underground without having to drill down.
What they found were briny aquifers deep beneath the permafrost layer. Whether or not these aquifers host life remains to be seen, but researchers are hopeful that they'll be able to paint a more complete picture of Earth's harshest ecosystem.
