Antarctica for Kids and Schools [Documentary]

This is a short video on Antarctica, the frozen continent at the bottom of the earth. This is Antarctica. It's really big, and it's really cold, and it's really far away from everything else. It is a wild place, a place of beauty and of extremes, largely untouched by humans. In fact, until a few hundred years ago, humans did not even know it was here. There are no cities, no towns, no countries, no one lives here permanently, just a few research bases where scientists come to learn about the continent. Antarctica is now an international nature preserve and place of scientific research. In the water and on the shores of Antarctica are tons of wildlife. There are very many penguins, for example, about 12 million in all. There are birds that migrate to and from here, and the waters teem with whales, dolphins, and seals. It is a beautiful and wild place. Antarctica is here, at the bottom of the earth, and covers almost everything below the Antarctic Circle, including the South Pole. Traveling to Antarctica is difficult. Most people who come to Antarctica take a plane all the way down to the bottom of Argentina, to a town called Ushuaia, then either a plane or a research vessel to the continent of Antarctica. This is Ushuaia, and this is the ship that's going to take us to Antarctica. I will be the only kid on the ship. We just left Ushuaia to head for Antarctica. Chile's over there, Argentina's over there, and Antarctica is over there, that way. The trip from Ushuaia to Antarctica goes by Cape Horn, the bottom tip of the Americas, and crosses the Drake Passage, and it is rough. Almost everyone on the boat was seasick, even in good weather. Blizzards are common even in summer, and wind chills can be dangerous if you're not covered up. In Antarctica, it gets very cold, so you have to dress in many layers to keep warm, and waterproof gear, and a life jacket every time you're on the water. That is an amazing iceberg. Depending on where you are, the temperatures in Antarctica can get from 30 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and in the winter, they can drop down to minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit. We were here in January, which is summer in Antarctica. If that sounds strange, it is because Antarctica is in the southern hemisphere, and the seasons are reversed. Not only are the days longer in the summer in Antarctica, they are really, really long. In fact, because most of Antarctica is below the Antarctic Circle, the sun does not set on most of Antarctica at all in the summer. To understand the 24-hour sun, it's best to do an experiment with a globe and a flashlight. The flashlight represents the sun. Here, we're looking at the southern hemisphere. It's summer down here, so the south pole is pointed towards the sun. This sticker represents someone standing on Antarctica. Now, as the earth rotates, it's easy to see that the area around the south pole, including most of Antarctica and the spot where a person is standing, is always in the light. That spot on Antarctica is getting 24-hour sun day after day. We were there in January and never saw darkness. This is me celebrating New Year's Eve with my parents at midnight, and this is me camping outside in a hole we dug in the snow, again about midnight. It's still very light outside. In the wintertime, the sun never rises. The south pole is now facing away from the sun, and our sticker never sees the light of day, day after day, 24-hour darkness. And that creates some difficult and dangerous conditions. One other fun fact about Antarctica's location. We're 90 degrees latitude away from home, so that means we're standing sideways. That water is not nice to swim in. In the winter, it's frozen, and in the summer, it's right around 32 degrees and full of ice. But that didn't stop me from jumping in for just a few seconds. In fact, I did it twice, once surrounded by icebergs and the second time in a volcano. More on that later. Even though it is so cold in Antarctica, lots of wildlife species thrive. The largest and most obvious are penguins, whales, seals, and some birds. There are many types of seals, like the crab eater seal, the whettle seal, and the elephant seal. Here is an elephant seal crawling up on the beach, and another taking shelter between some rocks. These are some whettle seals relaxing on an iceberg. And many kinds of whales, like the minke whale, the humpback whale, and the orca killer whales. Here is a humpback whale in the ocean splashing around. Here is the elusive minke whale in a calm bay in the middle of the night. And this is a pod of killer whales swimming by the ship. Few people know that killer whales are not actually whales, but rather a part of the dolphin family. The Antarctic shorelines are truly the kingdom of the penguins. There are millions and millions of penguins in Antarctica. This time of year, they build nests out of pebbles, they lay eggs, and they sit on their eggs until they hatch. Not every penguin is nice. Some of them steal pebbles from other penguins' nests and bring them into their own nest. The parent on the nest is protecting an egg or baby chick and can't get off the nest to fend off the pebble stealer or it risks losing its egg or chick to a hungry bird. And the chicks are seriously cute. There are actually many types of penguins. The emperor penguin, the macaroni penguin, the chin strap penguin, the gen 2 penguin, the adelie penguin, and many others. These are gen 2 penguins. You can tell from the orange beaks and white feathers near their eyes. These are chin strap penguins. They look like they have black chin straps on them or maybe that they are smiling all the time. This is an adelie penguin. Its head is all black, even the beak, and has cool eyes. There are seven species of penguins that live in Antarctica in all. But no such thing as a snow penguin, so I made one. This is the rarest type of penguin in Antarctica, a snow penguin. There's only one of them on the entire continent right now. There are so many penguins, they make their own freeways in the snow. Penguins are really cool. They are part of the bird family, but their wings are too small to fly. And when they walk on land, they waddle and it looks kind of funny. They are a little clumsy too, but in the water they are super swimmers and really fast. They use their wings as paddles and they can reach a top swimming speed of over 20 miles an hour. One thing that's unique about Antarctica is that there's virtually no vegetation on it. No trees, no bushes, no grasses, just a little bit of lichen on the rocks. And then there are microscopic photo plankton in the ocean. This is how the food chain works. Plankton and tiny shrimp, and there are billions of them. Most foreign animals eat the larger animals and eat the smaller animals. There are some birds, but there are virtually no animals on Antarctica that only live on land. Here's a little bit of polar region trivia. Approximately how many penguins get eaten by polar bears each day? The answer is zero because penguins live in the Antarctic where there are no polar bears, and polar bears live in the Arctic where there are no penguins. And then there's these guys. The arctic tern, the bird with the longest migration route in the world. Question, how far does the arctic tern migrate each year? The clue is that it's called an arctic tern. The arctic is pretty far away. The arctic tern migrates from the arctic ocean in the north to Antarctica in the south, basically pole to pole. With all the zigzags, it is an amazing 44,000 miles round trip. Just imagine walking 44,000 miles. And there's one more wildlife rule to remember here. It's very important not to disturb any animals. Antarctica is full of snow, ice, icebergs, and glaciers. It's part of what makes Antarctica so difficult to visit, but so beautiful to see. The glaciers, the ice, and the icebergs are all part of a much larger climatic process. Unlike at home, Antarctica is cold enough that the winter snow does not get melted away in In fact, it still snows in the Antarctic spring and summer. After many years, the snow gets piled up very high and becomes very heavy. All that weight compresses the bottom layers into ice, and that's what makes a glacier. The ice is so heavy and so slick, it moves. Gravity works. It slides very slowly down the hills and mountains from where it originally formed, and eventually into the ocean. When the ice breaks off from the bottom of the glacier, calving, and that's what makes the big icebergs. When it snows lots, the glaciers get bigger. When it calves lots at the bottom, they get smaller. So the icebergs are pieces of the glacier that have broken off at the bottom and have floated away in the ocean. Watching the glaciers calve and the icebergs get created is an amazing thing. Here is some ice calving into the ocean. Here is some ice falling from the glacier at the top of the cliff onto the glacier at the bottom. And here's some brand new icebergs born just a moment earlier when some ice calved off a glacier and also caused those waves. And the icebergs are beautiful. Some are small, some are huge, and some even have arches and caves in them. They often have a deep blue color. You may have heard the phrase, it's just the tip of the iceberg. It means that there's a lot more going on than what is obvious right now. The phrase comes from the fact that icebergs just barely float in the water, and what you see of an iceberg above the water is only a small fraction of what is below the water. Each iceberg is 10% above the water and 90% under the water. Here the water is calm enough that you can see some of the ice below the surface. That makes it more difficult for ships to travel safely. But icebergs are like floating islands, and the seals and penguins love them. There are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of icebergs. The process of how snow turns to ice, turns to glaciers, turns to icebergs is an awesome one to see. It's a natural process and has been going on for hundreds of millions of years. One thing that scientists are worried about is that over the last 100 years, the glaciers have been getting smaller. And that is because Antarctica is getting warmer. It is still really really cold, but it is getting warmer. And as it turns out, so is the rest of the world. It's only by a few degrees, but that can cause some problems. Global warming, or climate change, and what to do about it is a big debate right now. But a lot of the scientific research to understand why and how the climate is changing goes on right here, in Antarctica. Antarctica is a geologically active place. There are numerous volcanoes under the ice. And this volcano is on an island and is actually partially submerged by the ocean. Antarctica is full of volcanoes. I'm standing in one right now. It last exploded in 1970. This is the caldera. It's filled with water, but it's still a volcano. Never walk into a volcano without special permission and experts around that know what they're doing. And we were surrounded by experts who knew it was safe on this day. They know that because they can measure the pressure of the magma underground on the ground above. If it is low, the volcano is not ready to explode again. Of course, normally you should not go swimming in a volcano. But here, the freezing cold waters of the Southern Ocean is heated by the magma just under the Earth's surface, making the ocean water just regular really cold. For most of human history, no one knew Antarctica even existed. It was only the 1700s and the 1800s Europeans started exploring it. In the late 1700s, Captain Cook sailed around the continent in the Southern Ocean but never saw the actual continent itself. In the early 1800s, Bellinghausen was the first person to see Antarctica. American John Davis from Connecticut was likely the first one to step foot on Antarctica in 1821. In the late 1800s, the Belgica expedition got stuck in the ice while it was exploring Antarctica and got stuck for over a year before it could go back. After that, there were many explorers. Three famous ones in the early 1900s were Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen. Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole in 1911. In the early 1900s, many countries tried to claim Antarctica as their own but in 1959, many countries got together and signed a treaty called the Antarctic Treaty which made Antarctica an international park and a place of science and research. It remains that way today. Scientists do lots of interesting research. For example, by drilling down deep into the glaciers and studying the ice, they can see what the Earth's climate was like in the distant past and how it has changed. That's because the composition of the ice depends on the temperature, precipitation, and other climatic factors in effect at the time the snow fell. The deeper you go, the further back in time you go and scientists can now go back an amazing 1.5 million years. What's more, there are ancient air pockets trapped in the ice so we can actually see what the air was made of a million years ago and how it has changed. Other scientists are here to study the animals, the penguins, seals, whales, and migration patterns of birds. Antarctica is huge and the scientific bases currently in use are very far apart. There are a number of older scientific bases that are not in use anymore but are really interesting to see. They are quite small and look like shacks and are protected as historical monuments. There are many historical bases on Antarctica and this is one of them. People from the United Kingdom ran this base in the 1940s and 1950s. This is where they ate. Antarctica is really far away from everything else and this is the radio room where they communicate with the rest of the world. There is typing things, there is speakers, there's places where you can turn knobs. There's their logs from 1951. If an experiment ever took people away from their ship or their base overnight, camping was an option. Early explorers sometimes had to camp out and they built holes in the snow with walls around it to protect themselves from the wind. On this night, I camped in Antarctica myself. Same way, kind of like an igloo without the roof. Even though the temperature was below freezing, it was light all night long and beautiful. One good way to travel around in Antarctica is by ship and even that can be tricky because of all the ice. Bigger ships are safer and more comfortable than smaller boats like sailboats and we saw a few of those. To get to shore, smaller boats like zodiacs are useful. Again, watch out for the ice. On a super nice day, a kayak is a good way to see things up close. This is me kayaking through the icebergs on our way to an old shipwreck. The shipwreck was awesome, the iceberg's even more awesome. Even in the summer, traveling on land is exceptionally difficult in Antarctica's rough terrain. The best way to get around if the land is flat is by snowshoeing. Look at my hiker. This is me snowshoeing with my dad up a small hill and taking a break at the top. And if the land is mountainous, crampons and pickaxes. Crampons are basically spikes for your boots and pickaxes let you dig into the ice cliffs with your hands. Hiking on glaciers is extremely dangerous unless you know what you are doing, have the right equipment, and are in a big group. It's not safe to walk on glaciers because cracks called crevices form and if you fall in, you'll never get out. The snow makes the crevices invisible on the surface and easy to fall in. When you do, you can fall hundreds of feet. If you survive the fall, the next problem is how to get out and the usual answer is you can't. So when hikers do cross glaciers, they go in large groups and everyone is tied to a long and thick rope. If someone does start to slip into a crevice, the others dig in and the rope stops the person from falling too far. And it only makes sense to travel to Antarctica in the summer. In the winter time, even ships are a bad idea because the ocean all around Antarctica freezes and the continent becomes twice as big. So you can't get near it and if you did, it would be dark and dangerously cold. Antarctica is a very wild place and we should always protect it so it stays wild. And if you visit Antarctica, there's one more important rule. Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints to be covered back up by the snow. In other words, leave no trace that you were here so Antarctica will look as wild to future visitors as it did to you. Always practice leave no trace. Crushed it! And there's still so much to learn and still so much to see. Now I hope you know a little more about the frozen continent of Antarctica.