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Suspicions were first aroused after a team of Russians drilled deep into the ice to get a climate-record core sample. According to Montana State University microbiologist John Priscu, a veteran Antarctic researcher, the Russian scientists were puzzled by what their ice cores revealed.
当一支俄罗斯考察队在南极凿穿冰面获得了一份冰核气候记录样本，关于冰湖的猜测初露端倪。蒙大拿州立大学的微生物学家，John Priscu，是一位资深的南极考察者。据他说，俄罗斯科学家对冰核所显示的信息感到困惑不解。
“As they got deeper, though, they hit this funny ice, a different kind of ice that no longer had layers," Priscu says. "It didn’t have climate-record layering in the bottom. So they stopped drilling to find out what the heck they were getting into.”
“当他们向更深处挖掘，就触碰到了这片有趣的冰层，与其他冰层不同，这片冰层没有层次。”Priscu 说到。“在它的底部没有气候记录层。因此，他们停下了挖掘，而开始研究这冰层究竟是什么。”
What they were getting into was the vicinity of Lake Vostok, more precisely, the region at the bottom of the ice sheet above the lake. By 1996, scientists had gathered enough data on the structure of the ice sheet and the terrain beneath it to publish an article in Nature describing the hidden lake at Vostok
他们发现的正是沃斯托克湖的边缘，更准确地说，是湖面上方最底部的一层冰。到1996年，科学家已经收集了足够多关于冰面结构和其下方区域的数据，并在《自然》杂志上发表了一篇论文，描述隐藏在沃斯托克的古代南极湖。
