Antarctica was lucky: in 1959 in Washington, the 12 countries that had scientific missions on the continent signed an agreement to ban establishing military bases, conducting military maneuvers, and testing any kind of weapons on its territory. Since then, humans have gone there exclusively in the name of science. The results of the work of one such mission suggested that at a depth of several miles under the ice cap of Antarctica, the temperature is close to the melting point of ice. This assumption was expressed in 1957 and was the first step to a grand discovery. Another mission involved seismic soundings of ice in the area of the Soviet-operated Vostok Station (the word vostok means “east” in Russian), which was conducted by a scientific expedition led by Soviet geographer Andrey Kapitsa, son of Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa. As a result, a signal was recorded, reflecting off a surface under the ice. For about 30 years, it served as evidence of the presence of a layer of frozen rock under an ice shell many miles deep. However, the reflecting plane was so smooth that even Andrey Kapitsa suggested that there must be a huge subglacial lake with a length of more than 155 mi, a width of over 30 mi, and a depth of more than half a mile!