This Is Why You Can’t Go To Antarctica

Imagine the year is 1840 and you're a bonnie sea captain in the far south pacific when you come upon an incomprehensibly large wall of ice. It's a mile high and stretches as far as the eye can see in each direction. So you sail to the right to see if you can find a way around it and you sail and you sail and you sail and no matter how far you go it never ends. And in fact you wind up right back where you started. It is a literally impenetrable ice wall that you can never cross. Obviously this is where the world ends and obviously this ice wall was built to keep us from falling off the edge of the earth and obviously the world is flat. Except no, any bonnie sea captain worth his salt would have known that the earth was round in 1840. He would have known that he was traveling around in a circle. Nobody thought antarctica was the end of the world. But in terms of accessibility it might as well have been. Antarctica is a harsh punishing deadly place that's next to impossible to survive. So even though the world did not end in antarctica it is kind of like a new world begins. There's a reason NASA trains astronauts for future mars missions in antarctica. It's basically another planet down there. People have only taken up residence in antarctica in the last hundred years. It's still very much unexplored lands. In the old days unexplored lands were rife with legends and myths and speculations, derby dragons and whatnot. And antarctica is no different today. I started looking into it and I found a mountain of like wild stories and mysteries surrounding antarctica. So in this video let's take a look at the single most mysterious place on planet earth and get to the bottom of what's going on down there. If there's one word to describe antarctica it's desolate. An endless landscape of white snow and ice. Simultaneously one of the driest places on earth and home to 60 percent of the earth's freshwater. All of it locked up in an ice sheet that covers 99.6 percent of the continent. A that's way bigger than you might think. In most map projections you only see a little sliver of land mass at the bottom of the map or it gets divided up in some way. But it's more than twice the size of australia and big enough to cover the united states, mexico, the gulf of mexico, and most of the southern canadian provinces. And all of it under an ice sheet that averages 2160 meters thick. That's 1.3 miles high. Average. It's also the windiest place on earth with an average wind speed of 10 knots but it can reach up to 80 knots or 96 miles an hour due to something called katabatic winds which are basically caused by cold dense air being funneled through the valleys in the landscape. It's also extremely isolated surrounded by some of the largest oceans in the world with the mainland more than a thousand miles away from the closest inhabited continent. The closest point being the antarctic peninsula that reaches out to within 600 miles of tierra del fuego in argentina. And of course between them is the drake passage which is considered one of the roughest areas of ocean in the world. Because of course it is. Oh it's also old and lakey. There are about 400 underground lakes in antarctica or under ice i guess. Scientists started finding these lakes in the 1970s using radar seismic and satellite technologies and some of these are over three kilometers deep in the ice. And then in the 1990s russian scientists discovered a lake that they called lake bostock. This is the sixth largest lake by volume in the world and for some reason it's not ice. Why is it not ice? Everything around it is ice. It turns out there's a geothermal vent down there that's warming up enough of it to keep it liquid but again this is the sixth largest lake on the planet and it's under almost a mile of ice. 15 million year old ice. Geothermal vents of course are teeming with life in most places that they're found but this particular place has been completely isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years. There was a raging debate over what kind of sea creatures might live at the bottom of lake bostock for two decades. Scientists would get their answer in 1999 but more on that later. There is just something about us humans that we see a place like that, that remote, that isolated, that deadly and we say yeah i'm totally gonna go there. So starting in the early 20th century it was also the site of a string of tragedies as explorers raced to be the first to the south pole. And perhaps no explorer exemplifies the hubris of the so-called heroic age than robert falcon scott. Robert falcon scott besides having an amazing name started his career as a respected british navy officer but in the 1890s both his father and younger brother died unexpectedly which made him the lone provider for his mother and sisters so he became desperate to elevate his status but there just weren't a lot of advancement opportunities in the navy at the time and then in 1899 while home on leave he had a chance encounter with the president of the royal geographical society a guy named clements markham and he was funding an expedition to the south pole and he needed a commander so yeah robert falcon scott jumped at the chance so in 1901 he set sail on his ship discovery with fellow explorers ernest shackleton and edward wilson and they didn't quite make it to the pole although they did reach 82 degrees latitude which was the furthest south anybody had ever been at that time but yeah they eventually had to turn back with just 530 miles to go this was actually kind of a disaster they ran out of supplies the crew all came down with scurvy they had to resort to eating their sled dogs to survive and still robert falcon scott wanted to press on it was actually shackleton who insisted that they turn back in order to save the crew this actually led to a major falling out between the two of them that lasted for years still robert falcon scott returned to britain a hero they did cover new ground and made new geographical discoveries there was a scientific component to this trip so a lot of cool science was done and to the british public who had been kind of demoralized at this point in history yeah he was kind of like proof that brit still had some fight and pluck in him he got invited to castle by king ever the seventh he actually promoted him to the commander of the royal victorian order he became a toast of society for a while and he eventually met and married a wealthy socialite named kathleen bruce so in a way he got exactly what he wanted from that trip but deep down it always really bothered him that he never quite got to the south pole you know and he kind of blamed shackleton for holding him back uh and and publicly he was really nice to shackleton they got along and whatnot but in practice uh he was pretty antagonistic like in 1907 shackleton launched his own expedition to the south pole and robert falcon scott forbid him from landing in the McMurdo Sound which is the same place where the discovery had landed when they went the last time and at the time it was by far the safest landing spot but scott insisted that that was his field of work and he had rights to the area so yeah he was willing to put shackleton's whole crew in more swell dude shackleton landed there anyway on his ship which was called the nimrod and they got a lot closer this time they got to 88 degrees latitude it was a mere 95 miles from the south pole but again supplies ran out dogs were eaten and shackleton made the decision to turn back to save his crew which he succeeded at doing they all made it back barely by the way this would happen again to shackleton several years later on the endurance you might have heard the story of the endurance the ship basically got destroyed in the sea ice and he and his crew were stranded there for about four months before they could be rescued but they did all survive so while shackleton never quite made it to the south pole he did earn the reputation as a captain who you know always put his crew first even if it meant forgoing personal glory something that could not be said for robert falcon scott in november 1911 the ship terra nova landed on ross island and from there robert falcon scott set off with a crew to the south pole which he was going to reach this time no matter what for once and for all he was going to beat shackleton and he was going to be the first human being to the south pole the crew faced all the usual hardships including sled dog stew but they pressed on and on january 17 1912 they did it robert falcon scott reached the south pole and what he found there was a norwegian flag yeah roald emmonson got there just a month before him and he had no idea at least not until he saw the flag planted there so yeah he and his crew they they turned around and headed back to their ship which they never actually reached one by one they succumbed to the cold and starvation including eventually the captain himself and thus ended the career of robert falcon scott by the way roald emmonson made getting to the south pole look easy like dude just crushed it while everybody else had struggled and suffered and often died he had actually trained with his crew extensively for years beforehand and yeah the whole thing went really smoothly they got back to the boat 10 days early though it does need to be said his entire mission was strictly competitive like he was just there to get to the south pole there was no science component to it whereas scott's mission did have a science component to it in fact when rescue teams found their final resting place they had on them the first fossils ever found in antarctica and this actually turned out to be one of the first big mysteries of antarctica because these fossils were petrified wood meaning antarctica used to be covered in forests what this of course would go on to become part of the first early evidence of plate tectonics theory basically proving that antarctica used to be part of pangea and in a much more temperate region but after emmonson and scott and shackleton technology improved and more and more explorers and scientists made a lot more discoveries in antarctica and with it a lot more mysteries so i talked about lake vostok and how deep under the ice it was well there's another mysterious lake that's even deeper and they called it wait for it deep lake it's an inland lake in east antarctica it's about 55 meters below the sea level and as you go deeper into it the salinity increases drastically it's about the same salt content as the dead sea in fact it's 10 times saltier than the ocean but because of that salinity the water never freezes even though it gets down to negative 20 degrees celsius so you might think that nothing could live in water that cold but nope something does live there a study in 2008 showed that there's actually three species of a bacteria called haloarchaea which makes up most of the biosphere there haloarchaea if you're not familiar with it it's a single cell organism that basically it thrives in salty water there's also green algae that grows on the lake surface which is actually the main food source for the bacteria living down there and like i said there's three different species of haloarchaea and they're all adapted to different parts of the lake like some like deeper locations some like to eat the protein in the water and some like to eat the sugars that the green algae produces speaking of algae i mentioned earlier that 99 of antarctica is covered in an ice sheet well one of the few places that's not covered by an ice sheet is McMurdo dry valley and it kind of looks like mars there but one interesting site there is taylor glacier which has a five-story waterfall that pours into lake bonnie what's interesting about this particular waterfall is um it looks a lot like blood it looks like somebody just stabbed the glacier and it's bleeding out so they named it blood falls and uh yeah only recently scientists have been able to figure out what makes it look that color yeah dr ken livy is a scientist at john hopkins university and he used transmission electron microscopes to basically examine samples of the blood falls waters and what he discovered were tiny iron rich nanospheres that oxidize and nanospheres apparently occur in nature i think of nanospheres as like a molecular thing with graphite or something like that but they are real things that happen in nature they're about a hundredth the size of an average human red blood cell and they've got their own unique chemical and physical characteristics and these nanospheres come from a lake that's about 400 meters underground it's very salty and it's cut off from the air so it just kind of like sits there but it's very iron rich so once it seeps through the fissures and hits the air the iron rich water rusts creating blood falls yeah i've got to do it coming this sunday to the Poughkeepsie civic center tokamak instillerator featuring blood falls get tattoos free antarctica's largest ice shelf is the ross ice shelf named after dr james clark ross who discovered it in 1841 and when i say large i mean it's about the size of france it covers over 500 000 square kilometers it's also several hundred meters thick all that very interesting what really makes it interesting is that it seems kind of no that is not the newest apex twin single that is an actual ice shelf vibrating it's caused by winds blowing across the snow dunes that create vibrations on the surface those vibrations create seismic tones the thing is we can't actually hear those vibrations they're they're seismic tones so scientists have to use seismic sensors to hear the songs what you're hearing has been ranged up quite a bit so that we can hear it and it was discovered by accident they were actually installing these seismic sensors to try to observe other things and they kept hearing these these sounds and they didn't know where it was coming from and also the songs change based on environmental shifts like snow melting or moving in the late 1950s something really strange was discovered in the northern wilkes land in east antarctica it's a gravity anomaly which is exactly what it sounds like it's where there's a difference between the predicted value of gravity a specific site and what's actually observed there so yeah um there's just a place in antarctica where gravity works differently you know you know that that thing what could cause gravity to work differently in a certain spot well in this case it looks like it was a giant impact crater yeah studies have shown that there's an impact crater underneath the ice sheet that's 450 kilometers across which would make it twice the size of the chixulub crater in mexico you know the one that wiped out all the dinosaurs nasa is actually who found this gravity anomaly as part of their gravity research and climate experiment mission in 2006 now there's still studies to be done here it's not completely confirmed yet but if this were an asteroid impact they think it might have actually been strong enough to break up gondwana land as the supercontinent that separated australia and in 2017 a giant hole opened up in antarctica how big is this hole it's the size of ireland it's a hole the size of ireland a hole it's 78 000 square kilometers it's actually the largest hole found in antarctica since the 1970s which implies that there were bigger holes found in the 70s it's a structure called a palenya which is basically an area of open water and sea ice it's located in the wet lc in the southern ocean and it formed basically because the warmer water in the deeper parts of the sea pushed the warm water up causing the ice on the surface to melt and then as the water makes contact with the cooler surface water it sinks again and then it's reheated and pushed to the surface and this goes on over and over again now there's a lot of these types of holes these palenyas that have popped up in the sea ice all around antarctica but this one is massive and they're still not exactly sure how one this big could form with the uh the methods that they're aware of anyway so it's a bit of a mystery in 1964 the british royal navy's hms protector visited bove island which is located here between the cape of good hope and antarctica and while there they found a lagoon and a waterlogged lifeboat this boat didn't have any sails didn't have any markings just a just a nameless boat in a lagoon in a remote part of the world they also found a pair of oars and a 44 gallon barrel but they didn't find any signs of life or any human remains it seemed to just been this abandoned lifeboat and nobody knows who abandoned it or where they went even weirder in 1966 another expedition went to that same spot and this time the lifeboat was gone there was there was no mention of it like it just disappeared there are ghost ships are there ghost lifeboats because this might be a ghost lifeboat and now that i've talked about ghost ships um it's time to pivot a little bit everything that i've talked about so far is just kind of like weird things that happen in a weird part of the world there's some really crazy stuff going around about antarctica so let's get into that about 10 years ago a story started swirling around regarding lake bostock which i was talking about earlier and the life that might live down there according to this story a russian drilling crew was working at lake bostock in 2012 when they came across apparently a monster octopus that they named organism 46b this monster octopus apparently had all the kind of qualities you would expect from an octopus it was apparently really smart it was actually able to disable the workers radio it paralyzed prey by releasing venom into the water and it could shape shift into other shapes which octopuses are kind of famous for and according to the story the researchers were able to capture the octopus but russian authorities showed up and took it away and denied that it ever existed and that nothing was ever found there and because of that organism 46b remains a mystery and some even believe that putin plans to breed the octopus as a bit of a military weapon thanks antarctica speaking of monster some people believe that nazis built a secret base in antarctica where they took hitler at the end of world war ii there have been no shortage of hitler actually survived stories that happened since world war ii this is just the antarctica version of it and people who believe in the story also believe that from this base they were able to defeat american and british military by shooting down their planes with the use of ufos the u.s did eventually destroy the space in the 1950s with nuclear weapons but you wouldn't know this because various governments around the world had of course you know concealed all this knowledge and if a nazi base using ufos for war wasn't enough to blow your mind well guess what we have wound up exactly where we all expected to be aliens because you know nazis flying ufos that's that's crazy it's actually aliens and i guess it makes a little bit of sense if there are aliens living here on planet earth why not go to the most desolate and isolated place in the world to set up a a bit of a base and launch all your ufos from and of course there's no shortage of photographs that have weird anomalies in it that you can't quite explain that look like ufos and last but not least are the stories about pyramids or ancient civilizations that have been buried under the ice of antarctica some people believe that this might have been like an ancient egyptian civilization with the pyramids and stuff some people believe it might have been atlantis i mean after all we we know that antarctica used to be a more tropical continent that was in a you know more uh suitable place for life and civilizations to flourish i mean if you're gonna have an ancient city or civilization get buried underwater why not get buried under ice so what are we to make of all these crazy stories coming out of antarctica you know mysterious lifeboats monster octopuses aliens nazis well here comes the wet blanket so we can start with that mysterious lifeboat so in the early 2010s online researchers actually figured out what it was and it turns out it was a soviet antarctic whaling fleet that visited bove island in november of 1958 people were sent ashore but the bad weather set in and people were temporarily stranded so there's not a whole lot of story behind this a helicopter picked them up a few days later they weren't stranded for very long but they did leave the lifeboat behind in the lagoon um why it disappeared later it probably just sunk further down into the water the monster octopus in lake vostok has a pretty simple explanation it turns out um yeah it's entirely a work of fiction it can be traced back to a specific blog post by a guy named c michael forsyth who was a former writer for yes the weekly world news remember when you would go to the grocery store and you would see the weekly world news and you just knew that it was fiction and uh and it wasn't real and it was just like fake stuff uh feels like we've lost a yeah i guess the weekly world news isn't really around anymore but he published this on his own personal blog page and it was clearly labeled fiction i guess this is kind of like the sergey ponomarenko video that i did it was a story that kind of took on a life of its own and turns out the whole thing was made up but it's easy to believe because yeah colossal squid do exist in the southern ocean but uh because it's a subglacial lake it lacks sunlight has those extremely cold temperatures it's it's unlikely that a complex creature of that size could survive in it especially something as big and complex as an octopus now regarding all those pyramids that people claim to have found in antarctica it turns out that there's there's just a lot of mountains in the world that look like pyramids especially when shot from above with the sunlight hitting it at a certain angle and in antarctica especially you have a lot of like the tops of mountains kind of peeking out above the glacial ice which it just it looks like the size of a pyramid but it's actually a full-on mountain you just don't see most of the mountain this by the way is called that's a mountain or a hill surrounded by glacial ice in fact there's a whole range of mountains in antarctica called the Ellsworth mountain range it was discovered in 1935 and yeah it features a lot of these pyramid-like shapes this one in particular is 1265 meters tall from the base of the mountain to the top but all we really see is is the top of that mountain sticking out of the ice so yeah it looks like pyramids to a lot of people as far as the atlanta story goes ice has covered antarctica for 15 million years which is way longer than humans have walked the earth so if we were somehow able to establish a an ancient civilization at the south pole it would have only happened after everything was completely frozen over which seems impossible considering the temperatures and the fact that there's just not a whole lot of food there to stay warm and nourished yeah stories about atlantis are usually vague and lacked any solid facts so like yeah when when asians and europeans talked about unmapped places in the past they could have been talking about australia or oceania so now we get to the nazi conspiracy theories and here's the deal about that one um there's a little bit of truth to it nazis did actually land and camp in antarctica but it wasn't for a military base it was for a whaling station so that uh germany wouldn't have to be dependent on whale oil from norway the germans actually landed in an area that was already claimed by norway called the drowning mod land but you know they they planted flags there and they called it sure i pronounced that perfectly but yeah the area was abandoned by the nazis in 1945 which makes sense because nazis were out of power at that point but yeah thousands of scientists have visited that area since the 1950s it's been mapped by satellite aircraft nothing's there and it is also true that the u.s and britain conducted military and bombing operations around antarctica but those were test missions they didn't have anything to do with nazis well after the world war ii they seem to have been conflated with the nazi base to create stories about secret missions and ufos it all just comes together into a nice conspiracy stew and speaking of the sightings of ufos that i was talking about most of the crashed ufos i was talking about can easily be explained as rocks or mountain peaks or tipped over icebergs the fact of the matter is antarctica is a very strange alien landscape where things don't look normal because they're not normal and it's just really easy to apply wild and crazy stuff to the things that you see that don't make sense to you by the way one more thing i didn't even talk about this earlier but um the earth isn't hollow and antarctica isn't a gateway into the planet the hollow earth theory actually goes back to edmund halley um the same guy behind haley's comet who came up with the idea in the 17th century but this theory has been disproven since the 1730s and modern science has proven that the earth is actually composed of rock and iron it's all right there trust the shirt people now what does make antarctica really cool is all the research and scientific experiments that are being conducted there including the life in lake vostok no it's not a monster octopus but yes they have found evidence of life down there so in 1998 a joint team of scientists drilled an ice core down to lake bostock looking for life and by the way if you're thinking to yourself oh god did they contaminate a potential ecosystem that's been kept pristine for 15 million years well you're ahead of me the team was made up of scientists from russia france and the u.s the ice core they drilled was one of the deepest ice cores ever drilled it went down 3 623 meters or 11 886 feet that's over two miles they stopped thankfully about 100 meters above the water level but even in that ice they found extremophile microbes so there's there's definitely life down there in 2012 a russian team got a bit more bold and were able to actually collect water from the lake i know that sounds like they just dipped the ladle down there and took a sip but they were actually really careful about it so here's how they did it they drilled down to like just above the water barrier and then slowly just a little bit at a time pushed forward until the pressure from underneath forced the water up into the borehole and then they pulled the drill out as soon as the water went up there that water then froze which plugged up the hole and then they drilled into that plug and collected a sample from that ice that was made from lake water this method has been used several times since then and there are samples that have been studied and the consensus seems to be that there's a diverse and teeming ecosystem down there dna sequencing found over 3500 unique gene sequences 94 of which were bacteria and four percent were from more advanced eukaryotes these species were described mostly as what one would expect to find in you know brackish water around deep sea sediments and thermal vents but while the vast majority of the life that was found was unicellular organisms there was some multicellular ones in there nothing much more complex than that though except a team in 2020 found dna that was 97 similar to a type of rock cod that lives off the coast of antarctica called notathenia cordyceps now most don't think that there's actual species of cod living down there um it's expected that's a contamination of some kind because there has been some contamination yeah lake vostok has been a bit of a flashpoint among environmentalists because water samples have shown traces of kerosene and antifreeze in it yeah one of the problems that they ran into when they were drilling this again two mile long borehole is that sections of this borehole would freeze over so the russians started using kerosene and freon to keep the holes open and lubricated and they didn't just use a little bit they use 60 tons of the stuff now it wasn't like they were just pouring it into the lake there were only trace amounts that have been found in it but still anyway there's a whole debate around that but that's just one thing that's been studied in antarctica we studied things like the ozone hole million-year-old dna neutrinos from outer space and evidence of fires during the time of the dinosaurs oh and remember that mars meteorite that they thought might have had fossilized bacteria in it yeah that was that was found in antarctica they've also used antarctica to study team dynamics for future missions to other planets all of which is really cool but this video is already running really long so i'm gonna add an extra section to the version that i upload to nebula because i can do whatever i want there yeah in my last video i used a clip from the intro and some copyright troll tried to get my video taken down that's one of like a thousand different things i have to think about when i post things on youtube and look i love youtube but i gotta be honest um i kind of like not having to think about all that when i post on nebula youtube rules don't apply there i make the rules now there's been a lot of talk of 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