00:00Antarctica, a snowy world of about minus 46 degrees Fahrenheit, covered in ice for millions
00:07of years.
00:08But it wasn't always this way.
00:10Scientists just found something buried deep beneath the seafloor that shouldn't exist.
00:15Tiny golden droplets of amber.
00:19This means that Antarctica was once teeming with life and thick with trees.
00:24But something happened to it.
00:26That could reshape the way we see our own future.
00:32Antarctica has been a land of howling winds for millions of years.
00:35No tree can grow here today.
00:37But scientists who studied those lands decided to drill deep beneath the Antarctic surface.
00:44They went thousands of feet below the ice, pulling up ancient layers of sediment.
00:49And there, trapped in time, they found tiny pieces of golden amber.
00:55Amber is basically fossilized tree resin.
00:59It's found all over the world, often with perfectly preserved pieces of ancient life.
01:05Insects trapped mid-flight, pollen, frozen in time.
01:09Entire tiny ecosystems can be locked inside golden droplets.
01:13In every continent, but not in Antarctica.
01:16Until now.
01:19They discovered tiny specks from 0.5 to 1 millimeter in size.
01:25Smaller than a grain of sand, but with huge significance.
01:29This droplet had once oozed from the bark of a tree about 90 million years ago.
01:35What's even wilder, amber is only produced by certain types of trees.
01:40The ones that grow in humid, temperate rainforests and jungles.
01:45That's when the realization hit.
01:47Antarctica used to be a rainforest.
01:52Those tiny flecks of amber, clearly seen only under a microscope, tell us a vivid story
01:58of a living and breathing ecosystem.
02:01Around 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Antarctica
02:08could have been covered in lush, swampy forests filled with towering conifers, ferns, and
02:13ancient plants.
02:16Some of the fragments showed signs of damage.
02:19That means the trees that produced them had been injured, perhaps by wildfires or parasites.
02:26Though despite that, and despite the fact it spent millions of years on the seafloor,
02:31this amber was almost perfectly preserved.
02:34Solid, transparent, and free of cracks.
02:38Normally, amber buried under extreme pressure and heat just crashes over time.
02:44But this piece, it survived.
02:46That means other pieces could survive as well, and we might find more of them on the ocean
02:50floor.
02:52But this wasn't the first sign that Antarctica had once been a different place entirely.
02:59It started in 2017.
03:01A team of scientists drilled deep into the seabed near Pine Island Glacier on Antarctica's
03:07west coast.
03:08They pulled up sediment cores, long cylindrical samples of Earth that had been buried for
03:14millions of years.
03:16And it was insane.
03:18Inside these layers they found fossilized roots, pollen, spores, traces of an ancient
03:23forest that had once thrived here.
03:26And that's exactly what they'd been studying ever since then.
03:30In order not to damage anything, they had to spend years of hard work, breaking down
03:35the sediment into thousands of tiny pieces, and scanning them all under fluorescent microscopes.
03:42The same team also found another piece of the puzzle back in 2020.
03:47They found more sedimentary samples from the ocean floor that pointed to a land of dense
03:52trees, rivers, and wetlands.
03:55A world that looked more like the Pacific Northwest, or New Zealand.
04:00But why was Antarctica so warm back then?
04:03Well, that's all because of the atmosphere.
04:06Ninety million years ago, Earth's carbon dioxide levels were terrifyingly high.
04:12It was literally one of the warmest periods in history, with temperatures soaring even
04:16at the poles.
04:18Think about it, Antarctica had no ice caps.
04:23Instead it could have had buzzing insects and maybe even dinosaurs wandering through
04:27its forests.
04:29But in order to learn what happened to them, the team has to find more evidence.
04:35Antarctica really is a place full of mysteries.
04:38It's hard to study because it's covered in snow and ice so much that we don't even know
04:42its true shape and size.
04:45Some parts of the ice sheet are over 3 miles thick, half the depth of the Mariana Trench,
04:51the deepest trench on Earth.
04:53Luckily, snow has a great quality.
04:56It can freeze things in time perfectly.
04:59Layer by layer, year after year, it buries nature's past like a time capsule.
05:05At first, fresh snow is soft and shifts easily in the wind, full of air.
05:10But as more snow piles on top, it compresses, squeezing out the air pockets and hardening
05:15into dense ice.
05:18This freezing pressure locks everything inside.
05:21It traps all the air in the snow, which is why it's so hard to see the ice sheet.
05:26But if you look closely, you'll see that it's not just the ice sheet that's frozen.
05:31This freezing pressure locks everything inside.
05:34It traps ancient plants, animals, and even entire landscapes.
05:39And they literally get frozen in time, because the extreme cold slows down decay.
05:46It stops bacteria growth, preventing rot, and keeping things almost perfectly intact
05:52for thousands, sometimes even millions of years.
05:57That's exactly what's going on in Antarctica.
06:00Scientists have to literally scan it all the way down this snow in order to find what
06:04this place looked like millions of years ago.
06:08What they've found is an entire lost world, buried under miles of ice.
06:14It was beneath the thickest ice of East Antarctica, near the Aurora and Schmidt subglacial basins.
06:21The weight of the ice has been so immense for so long that it actually protected the
06:26land from erosion.
06:29Scientists call it the Ghost of Antarctica's Landscape, and it's nothing like the smooth,
06:35flat wasteland seen from above.
06:37They've found rivers that once flowed freely, now frozen in place, valleys carved by water,
06:44even three massive, sharply peaked hills.
06:47But what are they?
06:51To understand that, we need to go even further back in time, to the era when Antarctica was
06:57still part of a lost supercontinent.
07:02Hundreds of millions of years ago, the land we now call Antarctica was part of Gondwana,
07:07an enormous supercontinent that included South America.
07:11Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica all fused together.
07:18But as Earth's tectonic plates slowly drifted apart, Gondwana broke into pieces.
07:25Antarctica was ripped apart, its land stretched and fractured.
07:30The massive ice sheets that formed later covered these broken landmasses, preserving them like
07:36frozen fossils.
07:38As the ice shifted and melted over time, valleys formed, and ancient rivers likely carried
07:44water toward a coast that was hundreds of miles away from where it is now.
07:49But that's not the only thing Antarctica has hidden.
07:53If you stripped away the ice, you wouldn't see a smooth, empty continent.
07:57You'd see a super dramatic landscape, towering mountains, deep valleys, even fiery volcanoes!
08:07In West Antarctica, at least 138 volcanoes are buried under the ice.
08:12One of them, Mount Erebus, is still active, and inside, it has warm volcanic caves where
08:18you could walk in a t-shirt!
08:21Oh, and if it wasn't weird enough, Erebus is also spewing out gold!
08:26Yep, the actual tiny specks of gold from deep within the Earth!
08:31Scientists believe this happens because magma, the superheated, semi-molten rock beneath
08:36the Earth's surface, carries liquid gold with it as it rises.
08:41Every single day, Erebus releases about 0.2 pounds of it.
08:46That's worth around 6,000 bucks per day!
08:49In a year, that adds up to 64 pounds, or more than $2 million, floating into the sky!
08:56Unfortunately, before we grab shovels, we gotta remember that those are just microscopic
09:02particles.
09:03They're often smaller than 60 micrometers, thinner than a human hair.
09:08Not even mentioning that they're scattered around, up to 620 miles away from the volcano
09:13itself, finding them is nearly impossible!
09:18But that just shows that even in such a harsh place that looks just like a white desert,
09:22there are still many fascinating mysteries to discover.
09:27For example, somehow, life still clings there!
09:31In 2017, scientists drilled deep beneath the ice of the Ross Ice Shelf looking for water,
09:38but they found something fantastic instead!
09:41A river, hidden beneath 1,640 feet of ice, running through the dark.
09:48And inside it, hundreds of tiny shrimp-like creatures.
09:52They swarmed around the camera, blocking the lens, welcoming the scientists.
09:57In deep caves beneath the ice, DNA evidence has also shown traces of moss, algae, and
10:03possibly even unknown tiny animals.
10:07Well, turns out, even in one of the harshest places on Earth, life finds a way.
10:13And who knows what else we'll discover in the South Pole!
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