News from the fringe: Vostok: Lake of Shadows

"The inspiration for this article began in the summer of 1996, when a series of email messages began to appear suggesting the possibility that “someone” or “something” was surreptitiously removing all recent maps of Antarctica. The notion was so outrageous that even die-hard conspiracy theorists found themselves having to clarify the subject—it wasn’t that Big Brother and his henchmen were ripping map pages out of every World Almanac and atlas in the country, it had merely become harder to obtain recent maps on Antarctica.
Intrigued by the electronic statements, I placed a call to Penn-Oh-West Maps in Pittsburgh to check on the availability of Antarctic projections. The store owner’s response was startling: “Sorry, sir. All our new maps of South Pole are on back order. Must be some kind of problem with the USGS.”
The United States Geological Service, or USGS, produces the most detailed maps available, such as the 7.5-minute series topographic maps at a 1:20,000 scale. Nor is the USGS planet-bound—their expertise extends to detailed maps of the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
Reflecting on the situation, I thought that the changes on the seventh continent are so few that they hardly justify the creation of new maps. If someone desperately needed a map of the South Pole, it would suffice to resort to a National Geographic map or to the nearest Rand McNally atlas. But could the polar conspiracy theorists be onto something?
The matter of polar cartography was soon forgotten—at least for me—until in 1999, the media trumpeted news of a truly sensational discovery: a lake whose waters had never seen the light of day, at least not for millions of years, a few miles beneath the polar icecap. The new body of water was christened with the name of the Russian experimental station located immediately above it: Vostok."