- 2 days ago
Deep under Antarctica’s ice lies an underground lake that completely flips what we thought we knew about life on Earth, because organisms survive there without sunlight, in freezing temperatures, and under pressures strong enough to crush metal. Scientists discovered microbes living off chemical reactions in the dark, proving life doesn’t need warmth or light—it just needs the right chemistry. The lake stayed sealed off from the surface for millions of years, creating an isolated world that evolved on its own, like a hidden time capsule from ancient Earth. This strange ecosystem now helps researchers imagine what life might look like on icy moons like Europa or Enceladus, where oceans hide beneath thick shells of frozen crust. Animation is created by Bright Side.
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This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.
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00:00Scientists just discovered a lake in Antarctica that flips everything we thought we knew about life on Earth.
00:07They drilled through thick ice and found liquid water where everything should be frozen solid.
00:12And inside this water, there is life.
00:15I mean actual living organisms thriving in the dark, untouched for ages.
00:21The story starts with an expedition that added a new, super important spot to the Antarctica map.
00:27Between November 2019 and January 2020, researchers trekking across the frozen desolation reached an area called Enigma Lake.
00:37They thought they were walking over a huge slab of solid ice, but their gear showed something different.
00:43So they used a powerful drill to get through the ice, peered beneath layer after layer, and detected at least 40 feet of liquid water trapped under the surface.
00:52They came looking for a rock, but found a hidden world under ice in this Antarctica lake, where they would least expect it.
01:01The scientists were shocked and didn't stop at this discovery.
01:04They wanted to know where all this water came from, because in this part of Antarctica, the climate is ruthless.
01:11Extreme temperature, low precipitation, punishing winds, and solar evaporation aren't exactly perfect conditions for a lake.
01:18Any fresh water was supposed to have dried up long ago, so there had to be a source for refills for a subglacial lake in Antarctica like this one.
01:28The researchers looked at the chemical composition of the salts and dissolved materials in the water.
01:33They noticed some patterns that pointed to a source.
01:36It looked like the nearby glacier was feeding the lake via some underground pathway nobody expected to exist.
01:43So there it is, an amazing Antarctica discovery, hidden beneath ice, fed not from rain or surface melting, but from an underground flow that circles the earth in silence.
01:55And because of that, when the team drilled deeper, they didn't just find water, they found a secret ecosystem.
02:03Life, where they thought there couldn't be any.
02:06Now, by life, here, I don't mean the kind that waves at us.
02:10I mean tiny creatures, tiny structures, microbial communities that evolved in isolation, shielded by the ice, and pretty restricted to their hidden home.
02:20They cover the lake bed in microbial mats, not just blobs of algae, but complex, carpet-like mats of microorganisms.
02:28Some mats look like thin, spiky coverings, others like thick, crumpled carpets, or even tree-like structures up to 15 inches tall.
02:37And these formations, looking straight out of a sci-fi movie about life on distant planets, aren't random specks of DNA floating in water.
02:45They are thriving, building structures, layering, changing over time.
02:49So the lake bed is kind of like a forest floor, only it's dark, cold, and covered by ice.
02:55If life can flourish under 45 feet of ice in near darkness, maybe our ideas of where it can exist need updating.
03:04And we don't know what happens when we disturb this hidden lake ecosystem.
03:09What if we inject humans, machinery, or even our breath into the mix?
03:14These microbes have lived isolated for who knows how many millennia, maybe even millions of years, without any exposure to the world above.
03:22If humans mess with them, these organisms could be at serious risk when they meet microbes they had never met before.
03:29The lake could get contaminated, and its ecosystem could change for good.
03:35As we step into this new territory, we must be extra cautious.
03:39After all, the entire Antarctica is like a book of secrets of evolution, adaptation, and survival that we must read carefully.
03:47This continent keeps surprising us.
03:50Animals that were never seen before turn up in its remote corners, from bizarre sea creatures to ice-loving insects you didn't know existed.
03:59For example, the ice-loving sea anemone scientists spotted hanging upside down from the underside of the Ross ice shelf.
04:06It looks like a delicate flower glued to the ceiling, waving its tentacles into water as cold as a bad breakup.
04:14Researchers steered a robot under the ice and found a brand new species.
04:18Then, there's the celebrity newcomer with serious red carpet energy, the Antarctic Strawberry Feather Star.
04:26This floating pom-pom can have up to 20 arms.
04:29It got its nickname because the body looks, you guessed it, strawberry-ish.
04:34And, oh, I guess Antarctica is the last place where you'd expect to see a fish nursery, but it has the largest known one in the whole world.
04:43Researchers were there towing their cameras along the Weddell Sea seabed to map it when they spotted thousands, then millions of identical bulls in the sediment.
04:53The nests covered 93 square miles of seafloor, and there were a total of 60 million of them, one every 10 inches.
05:00All the nests belonged to ice fish.
05:03These creatures are white-blooded, meaning they don't have hemoglobin, the stuff that makes blood red, and somehow, they still manage to survive in water cold enough to shatter your soul.
05:15Every nest had a parent fish sitting guard over about 1,700 eggs.
05:20Turns out, Weddell seals feast on ice fish.
05:23So this massive breeding ground isn't just a nursery.
05:26It's also a buffet for the neighborhood predators.
05:29And speaking of buffets, the ice fish themselves feed from a warm upwelling that pulls up nutrients and microscopic zooplankton.
05:39It's all pretty cool that the ice fish colony has a hard edge, a literal line in the sand.
05:44The edge of that border matches perfectly with the outer rim of the warm upwelling, which looks like a carefully crafted evolutionary trick.
05:52Another Antarctica discovery that shocked scientists wasn't a cool-looking fish or a dinosaur bone, but something probably even more important for science.
06:03Bubbles
06:03Tiny ancient bubbles trapped inside what might be the oldest ice ever brought up to daylight, nearly 1.2 million years old.
06:12Before this discovery, researchers had recorded climate history going back 800,000 years, but they wanted more.
06:20They spent years searching for the perfect spot where ice could tell the story straight through.
06:24Some Antarctic regions hold ice even older, maybe 3 or 4 million years.
06:30But it's patchy, and they needed a continuous record.
06:34When they finally drilled into the right spot, they found crystal-clear ice cores with bubbles that trapped the atmosphere of Earth as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago.
06:44When scientists analyze the air inside, they're not just studying gases.
06:49They can tell what our distant ancestors inhaled, what the planet exhaled, and how the rhythm of life and climate played out long before us.
06:58The period around 900,000 years ago, the same time sealed inside this ice, may have been one of humanity's closest calls.
07:06According to genetic studies, the human population shrank to about 1,300 individuals on the entire planet.
07:15Nobody knows what exactly led to this, but it could have been the climate.
07:19So these ancient bubbles might hold the clues we need to understand how our ancestors survived one of the toughest chapters in Earth's story.
07:28And maybe how we can survive the next.
07:31Because, you know, the planet keeps repeating itself in new and uncomfortable ways.
07:35And Antarctica has lessons to teach us.
07:39One lesson we might learn the hard way has to do with what's under its ice.
07:44Scientists recently found that there's something brewing beneath Antarctica that's anything but chill.
07:50There might be volcanoes there, quietly waiting for their moment.
07:54Yeah, you heard it correctly.
07:56Volcanoes, the hot, fiery kind sitting under miles of ice.
08:00The team used computer simulations and found that when parts of the ice melt, the pressure holding those volcanoes down eases up.
08:08And boom!
08:09They could start melting even more ice from below.
08:12It's like a self-feeding loop of chaos.
08:14The ice melts, volcano wakes up, then more ice melts.
08:17Even if humans stopped affecting the climate conditions on the planet tomorrow, that chain reaction could keep going.
08:24Because it's not just about the air.
08:26It's about the fire hiding underneath.
08:29The scariest part is that this kind of melt could raise sea levels way more than we thought.
08:34And since Antarctica has over 70% of all the freshwater reserves on Earth, you can imagine the drama level it could lead to.
08:42So you see now that Antarctica map is like a real-life board game for humans.
08:47And we must be careful studying and playing it.
08:50So, there's a mysterious doorway in the middle of Antarctica.
08:56Some people think it's Bigfoot's vacation home, or a shuttlecraft from Star Trek.
09:01Or maybe a door to Agartha, a mythical kingdom some people believe is located in the center of the Earth.
09:08Well, the scientists debunked all these poetic theories and explained that what looks like a mysterious doorway is located in an area of fast sea ice.
09:17It's offshore of the coast, and is full of little islands with shallow water around them.
09:23When ice flows around hard rocks hidden underneath, it can create patterns that look odd but are totally normal.
09:30In this spot, the ice is thin, so the rocks underneath have a big effect on how the ice moves.
09:37The cold winds in Antarctica also shape the ice and snow and make it look like they're lines and shapes.
09:43So, the mysterious doorway is just a rocky ridge poking out because the ice has melted a little.
09:50The top of the doorway is the tip of the rock, and the sides are snowy trails left by strong winds blowing in the same direction.
09:58It's essentially an iceberg that got stranded and is melting in one place.
10:03One YouTuber found another out-of-place mysterious object more than 150 miles off the shore of Antarctica.
10:12A 400-foot-long ice ship.
10:14The Internet went wild with theories like that the ship must have ended up there right from the Bermuda Triangle.
10:20But there was no scientific proof that it was a ship and not just a large chunk of ice.
10:25And once some other Internet users revisited the place, they noticed the ice melted in the summer and the hypothetical ship was gone.
10:35Another mysterious Google Maps find in Antarctica was a pyramid.
10:40And before you make up an exciting theory about how the ancient Egyptians built a secret base here,
10:45I have to tell you it turned out to be just a mountain.
10:48It's part of the tallest mountain range in Antarctica that stretches for almost 250 miles.
10:54It's not the first pyramid on this continent, as explorers from the British Antarctic Expedition
11:00found another unusually shaped mountain and nicknamed it the Pyramid.
11:05But this one didn't even have a pyramid shape.
11:09Here's one Antarctic find that definitely won't disappoint you.
11:13A giant ice shelf that reminded scientists of the Grand Canyon.
11:18A special submarine robot named RAN, covered over 600 miles under the thick ice,
11:24and brought back some amazing footage of icy mountains, valleys, flat plateaus, and swirly patterns made entirely of ice.
11:33One of the strangest things RAN found was giant ball-shaped holes, or scoops, in the ice.
11:40Sadly, scientists lost track of the robot.
11:43They think that curious Wendell seals may have accidentally bumped into RAN and caused it to get stuck.
11:48To save energy, RAN probably shut itself down, and the scientists couldn't find it again.
11:54But the team is hoping to build a new robot and continue exploring this icy canyon
11:59to see how the patterns under the ice might change over the years.
12:03Another huge Antarctic canyon was found thanks to bad weather.
12:09A team of sound experts had to pause their work at the Casey Research Station in a storm.
12:14Instead of waiting around, they decided to use the unexpected free time to map the seafloor near Adams Glacier.
12:22And that's how they found a canyon that is almost 7,000 feet deep,
12:26almost 30,000 feet wide, and stretches over 28 miles away from the glacier.
12:32During the mapping, they discovered just part of the canyon before they had to go back to the research station.
12:38But when bad weather came in again, the ship went back and mapped more of the canyon.
12:43They were working in waves up to 13 feet high and super powerful winds,
12:48but they managed to get about 15 hours of data to complete their map.
12:52On the way back to Australia, they stopped one last time, and now they've got a full picture of the canyon.
12:59Studying it is helping scientists learn more about the history of glaciers
13:02and the interaction between the Antarctic ice sheet and the ocean.
13:07Now, there's a frozen lake in Antarctica called Lake Enigma.
13:12For a long time, people thought the lake was completely frozen solid.
13:15But during one expedition, researchers found that under the thick ice,
13:20there was a layer of liquid water about 40 feet deep.
13:24To learn more, they drilled through the ice and sent down a camera to explore what was hiding in the lake's depths.
13:30The lake's water, which they think comes from the nearby amorphous glacier
13:34through a secret underground pathway, was filled with strange microbial life.
13:39These tiny microbes lived in mats that covered the lakebed.
13:43Some of the mats were thin and spiky,
13:45and others looked like crumpled carpets, or even small tree-like shapes that grew up to 16 inches.
13:52Many of the microbes could make their own food through photosynthesis, just like plants do.
13:57And it gave the lake a high amount of oxygen.
14:00One of the coolest discoveries was a type of microbe, which usually lives in low-oxygen places.
14:06Lake Enigma might be similar to environments on icy moons like Europa or Enceladus.
14:11So, it could mean that these moons also have hidden water under their ice, and possibly microbial life too.
14:18One more mind-boggling discovery from Antarctica is tiny pieces of amber in mudstone,
14:25found here for the very first time.
14:27It took scientists years of studying incredibly well-preserved fossilized roots,
14:32pollen, and spores that they found back in 2017.
14:36Amber proves that resin-producing trees once grew in Antarctica,
14:40part of a lush rainforest that existed near the South Pole during the mid-Cretaceous period.
14:46Back then, disclaimer, I wasn't around then,
14:49the trees would have had to survive through months of darkness during the long Antarctic winters.
14:55Scientists believe they adapted by going dormant for a long time.
14:59The amber pieces the scientists found are tiny,
15:02but they are beautiful shades of yellow and orange with bumpy surfaces
15:06that show how the resin flowed out of the trees.
15:09This resin likely leaked out to protect the trees from insects.
15:13It was preserved because water quickly covered it and kept it safe from sunlight and air.
15:19A scientist was browsing through satellite images for brown trails of penguin waste
15:23and found four new colonies of emperor penguins at the base of the globe.
15:29These new colonies likely have been around for years,
15:32though three of them are rather small, with fewer than a thousand breeding penguins each.
15:36One of the new colonies was found close to a place called the Lazarov Ice Shelf,
15:42where there used to be a larger penguin colony.
15:45They thought this colony went extinct in 2019.
15:48But it seems the penguins have just moved a bit because of changing sea ice conditions.
15:53So studying them can help us learn more about how emperor penguins adapt to changes in the environment.
15:58Now, there used to be a giant river system in Antarctica 40 million years ago.
16:04Researchers found proof of it after studying soft sediments and hard rocks from the frozen seabed.
16:10They looked at tiny bits of radioactive elements, like uranium and lead,
16:15and learned that the deeper dirt came from the time of dinosaurs.
16:18The dirt closer to the surface was younger and had an interesting pattern,
16:23like the kind you see in river deltas today, such as in the Mississippi River or Rio Grande.
16:29Scientists found tiny signs of life in the sand.
16:32The river that once flowed here started in the Transantarctic Mountains
16:36and traveled 930 miles before it reached the sea.
16:41Researchers kept studying newer layers of dirt from about 20 million years ago.
16:45They hope this will help them predict what the Earth's weather patterns might be like in the future.
16:51That's it for today.
16:52So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.
16:57Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright side!
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