Disturbing Photos Taken In Antarctica That Researchers Still Cannot Explain

A strange, hovering object drifts above a remote Antarctic research station. Massive icebergs float in unnaturally straight rectangles, and mountains, lakes, and rivers sit buried under miles of ice, home to ecosystems that have been sealed away from the outside world for thousands and thousands of years. This series of images were recorded by a webcam at a German research station in Antarctica. The station keeps a camera running to document weather and conditions around the base, and that footage is later stitched into time-lapse videos. On August 10th, 2012, one of those time-lapse clips ended up drawing some attention. In a short stretch of the video, a round, blurry object appears in the sky above the station. It's circular, silvery, and seems to hover in place rather than move across the frame. Then, just as suddenly as it appears, it's gone. The object only shows up in a few frames. People slowed the video down, scrubbed through it frame by frame, and debated what they were actually seeing. Some pointed out that the footage is time-lapse, meaning long stretches of time are compressed into seconds, which makes brief appearances like this harder to judge. So what do you think? Genuine UFO? Were they testing something at the station? Share your thoughts down below. And take a look at this, a massive, almost perfectly rectangular block of ice, sitting out in Antarctica. And no, it wasn't carved by humans. The photo you're looking at here was taken by NASA scientist Jeremy Arbeck during an Operation IceBridge flight over the northern Antarctic Peninsula on October 16th, 2018. He saw this strangely sharp, cornered, almost perfectly rectangular iceberg floating nearby. Then he saw another, and another. Arbeck spotted a bunch of these tabular bergs bobbing around that day. The term tabular iceberg just means icebergs that are flat and rectangular, almost like a tabletop. One he photographed, later called Tabular B, had such straight edges, they almost don't seem natural. But these icebergs form when chunks break off the edges of ice shelves. They're fresh, so the wind and waves haven't rounded them out yet. They look like massive minimalist art pieces, though. The mountain you're looking at is way down in the southern Ellsworth Mountains in Antarctica, about 4,150 feet tall. From above, it looks insane, like a perfect Egyptian pyramid was built in the middle of the ice. A photo that made it go viral came out in 2016. The mountain's been there forever, mostly hidden in the snow. People at the nearby Patriot Hill Station have probably seen it without realizing how weird it looks from up above. Over millions of years, ice and snow have slowly worn the rock down. Water fills cracks during the day, freezes at night, expands, and eventually breaks off chunks. Faces eroded at the same rate, leaving a mountain that looks pretty uncannily similar to a pyramid. At least, that's the explanation they want you to believe. That's probably the case. I just really want there to be a secret ancient pyramid out in Antarctica. 2016, a satellite snapped a strange image over a herd island in the southern Indian Ocean. Clouds over the volcanic island had broken into ten dark spinning holes, each about eight miles wide. The gaps twist and curve like tiny whirlpools frozen in the sky. At the heart of it all is Mossan Peak, a 9,000-foot active volcano sitting in the middle of Herd Island. It's small compared to the peaks that usually create these cloud swirls, but somehow, it churned out a row of spinning holes that were way more intense and tightly packed than usual. Normally, cloud swirls drift out in straight, even lines, but here, the holes were twisting and shifting unpredictably. But ten perfectly spaced, dark voids violently spinning above a remote volcanic island? That's some serious imagery right there. This is a radar image of a very strange mountain range in Antarctica. Under nearly 2,000 feet of ice, there's a mountain range the size of the European Alps in East Antarctica. The Gembertsov Mountains. No one actually saw them until the Soviets discovered them in 1958. But even now, they're completely covered, so we only know what they look like from radar. The range is full of jagged peaks and deep valleys that somehow survived hundreds of millions of years of glaciers and ice sheets. Some of the rocks are a billion years old, formed when the supercontinent Rodinia pushed plates together. Later on, shifts in the Earth's crust, like drifting and tectonic movement, basically re-lifted the mountains, keeping them from getting ground flat. During the Antarctica-Gembertsov Province Project missions in 2007-2009, aircraft flew across East Antarctica, radar mapping every ridge and slope they could find. Scientists found liquid water running through the valleys almost two miles beneath the ice, which was crazy. You'd expect everything to be frozen solid down there. They also used seismic scans, basically listening to vibrations passing through the ground, to see how the mountains sit on ground. These scans showed the mountains' roots plunging all the way down to the Earth's mantle, meaning they're anchored deep in the planet, which explains how they've survived for so long without being completely worn away. What exactly are these things? Deep under the Larsen Ice Shelf, there's a hidden world no one had ever seen before. Researchers drilled roughly 1,640 feet straight down through the ice to reach an underground river, and when they finally dropped a camera into the water, the first thing they noticed was movement—hundreds of tiny, shrimp-like creatures swarming the lens. Craig Stevens, an oceanographer at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said it left the team, quote, jumping up and down for joy, and that, quote, having all those animals swimming around our camera means there's clearly an important ecosystem process happening there, end quote. The cavern was unlike anything they'd expected—instead of a smooth, flat roof, the ceiling was jagged and uneven. Stevens described it like a loaf of bread, with a bulge at the top and a narrow slope at the bottom. And the water below didn't just flow in one direction—it split into four or five distinct layers moving in opposite directions, something that Stevens said, quote, changes our current understanding and models of these environments. These images were captured at a lake in Antarctica. They may not look like much, but let's dive in, shall we? Lake Enigma sits deep under Antarctic ice—you'd think it would be frozen solid. But when researchers drilled through nearly 40 feet of ice, they found a hidden layer of liquid water and, more importantly, life. The team lowered a camera into the lake and saw there were microorganisms covering the bottom. Some looked like spiky things, others like crumpled carpets or tiny tree-like structures over a foot high. It was life where no one was expecting to find it. The water isn't just trapped up there—it's being fed by the nearby Amorphous Glacier through some kind of underground channel. But this part of Antarctica is brutal. The constant howling winds and nonstop evaporation should have dried up anything like this a ges ago. Obviously, that isn't the case, though. Among the tiny organisms was, I'll try and pronounce this right, Patiscibacteria, which normally don't survive in water with lots of oxygen, meaning they've somehow figured out a completely different way to live. The microbes aren't just floating around aimlessly, either. Some of them are forming mats that act like little communities, with some organisms helping each other and others preying on their neighbors—stuff scientists have never seen in an ice-covered lake before. The lake's giving researchers a chance to see how life adapts under these insane conditions. This is the Weddell Sea Polynia, one of Antarctica's strangest mysteries. It's a massive stretch of open water, hundreds of square miles wide, sitting smack in the middle of sea ice that should be frozen solid in temperatures well below minus 30 degrees Celsius. Most of the southern ocean should be a solid sheet of ice, yet this giant hole keeps reappearing, and sometimes it sticks around for months. Scientists have some idea about why it happens. Sometimes warm water from deep in the ocean rises to the surface, and sometimes really strong winds, as powerful as hurricanes, push the floating ice away from that spot. But even so, scientists still can't predict exactly when this hole will show up. It appeared from 1974 to 1976, then basically disappeared for 40 years, then popped back up in 2016 and 2017. Nobody knows why it takes these long breaks. But this isn't just a weird-looking hole in the ice, it actually affects the whole planet. When ocean water freezes into ice, the salt doesn't freeze with it, it gets left behind in the water. That makes the water heavier and denser. This heavy water sinks all the way down to the ocean floor and pushes other water out of the way. Kind of like how dropping a stone into a pool makes ripples spread out. But instead of ripples, this creates a massive, slow-moving current that travels all around the world's oceans. This sinking water is thought to help produce Antarctic bottom water, which drives the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt. This belt carries heat, oxygen, and nutrients everywhere. It can even affect the weather in places thousands of miles away from Antarctica. So even though it looks like just an opening in the ice, that hole is actually connected That's been the video for today, I will catch you, yes you specifically, in the next one.