A lake, covered by almost three miles of the West Antarctic ice sheet, has been cut off from the rest of the world for almost a million years.

Now a team of British engineers is preparing for an expedition to get through to Lake Ellsworth, and use hot water to dissolve all the ice around the lake.

The expedition will be financed by the UK Natural Environment Research Council with almost 7 million pounds to gather samples of water from the lake and residue on the lake's bottom.

Their mission may lead to the discovery of unidentified forms of life that may exist in the obscured waters and possible hints to forthcoming climate change.

David Pearce, science coordinator of the group, said: "Finding life in a lake that could have been isolated from the rest of the biosphere for up to half a million years will tell us so much about the potential origin of, and constraints for, life on Earth, and may provide clues to the evolution of life on other extraterrestrial environments."

Pearce also said, "Uncovering nothing will be more momentous, since that would just delineate perimeters at which life can no longer continue living in this planet."

Lake Ellsworth is one of more than 380 subglacial Antarctic lakes and the first to be scrutinized for possible signs of life.

The advance party, which will depart next week, is carrying 70 tons of equipment to the research site, where they are expected to face temperatures below minus 25 degrees Celsius (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Antarctic spring.

The actual drilling will commence in October 2012.

Lake Ellsworth is approximately 10km long and about 3 kilometers wide, almost the same size as Lake Windermere in England.

The BBC report stated that the hot-water drill is essentially a spraying device on the bottom of a hose 3.2km long. About 90 liters of pure water will be produced at the Ellsworth site by heating and then filtering ice, using a boiling machine.

Hot water will be sprayed from the bottom of the hose, melting its way to Lake Ellsworth.

Exploring sub-glacial lakes may aid scientists plan and implement missions to search for life on other worlds such as Jupiter's moon Europa, which was described as having a liquid ocean beneath a thick layer of ice.

This could also be the key issue on the climate aspect, which fundamentally entails discovering how likely the ice sheet is to melt in the coming decades and centuries.

"There is some evidence from outside Antarctica that sea levels were higher at various times in the last million years - 125,000 years ago, 380,000 years ago - but we have no evidence that the water came from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet," stated Professor Mike Bentley from Durham University.