A race has begun to reach one of the last unexplored regions on Earth: the cold, dark waters of sub-glacial lakes in Antarctica.

For years, Russian researchers have been drilling down to Lake Vostok, 4 kilometres beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet, but they have yet to reach water.

They now have competition. A consortium of nine UK universities plus the British Antarctic Survey and the National Oceanography Centre got funding this week for a project to drill through the West Antarctic ice sheet to reach Lake Ellsworth, which is about 3 kilometres beneath the surface.

The drilling will take place over the Antarctic summer of 2012-13. Unlike the Russian project, which has controversially used kerosene to prevent the drilled hole from refreezing, the UK-led effort will use a hot water drill. The water will be made by melting ice from a few hundred metres below the surface.

The lake water will be studied for signs of life, which if it exists, has been isolated for hundreds of thousands of years.