- 4 hours ago
his is the geological event that glaciologists have been warning about for decades. As of April 16, 2026, the Antarctic continent is undergoing a massive structural failure. From the record-shattering 8km retreat of the Hektoria Glacier to the final disintegration of the A-23A "Megaberg," the ice is splitting faster than any model predicted.
🚨 THE 2026 FRACTURE: We investigate the West Antarctic Rift System, where 138 hidden volcanoes are thinning the Earth's crust from below. New data from the 2026 SWAIS2C expedition suggests the "Magma Sponge" beneath the ice is accelerating the slide of the "Doomsday Glacier" into the sea.
🌊 THE IMPACT: This isn't just about melting; it's about a "Continental Snap." We look at the "Lid-Off" effect happening at the Hektoria Glacier and why the seafloor "Ice Plains" are the new tipping point for global sea levels.
🚨 THE 2026 FRACTURE: We investigate the West Antarctic Rift System, where 138 hidden volcanoes are thinning the Earth's crust from below. New data from the 2026 SWAIS2C expedition suggests the "Magma Sponge" beneath the ice is accelerating the slide of the "Doomsday Glacier" into the sea.
🌊 THE IMPACT: This isn't just about melting; it's about a "Continental Snap." We look at the "Lid-Off" effect happening at the Hektoria Glacier and why the seafloor "Ice Plains" are the new tipping point for global sea levels.
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00:00A hole about the size of Switzerland or South Carolina keeps popping up in the Antarctic eyes.
00:06This opening is growing steadily, and it took scientists half a century to figure out why.
00:12They found the answer with the help of seals.
00:16The scientists first spotted this gap, called Maud-rise-polyneia, in the Weddell Sea in 1974.
00:23They were about to close the case as the hole disappeared,
00:26but it popped out again in the following two years, and then only in 2016.
00:32The giant hole is near Maud-rise, an underwater mountain.
00:36This type of hole is a polyneia, a rare patch of open water surrounded by thick sea ice.
00:43In Antarctica, when winter hits, the ocean's surface freezes,
00:47and sea ice spreads out to cover an area about twice as big as the continental United States.
00:53Along the coast, openings in the sea ice pop up every year.
00:57This happens when powerful coastal winds blow off the continent and push the ice away.
01:03But it's a whole lot rarer for these openings to form way out over the open ocean,
01:08hundreds of miles from land, where the water is thousands of feet deep.
01:13Researchers from several universities teamed up to study the Maud-rise-polyneia
01:18using computer models and satellite images.
01:20They even recruited some Antarctic seals to help out.
01:24These seals wore tiny helmets on their furry round heads with tracker sensors attached to them.
01:31Thanks to these sciency seals, the team could collect water data from the source.
01:36After the research, the scientists discovered that the hole resulted from a complex mix of factors.
01:42The wind, ocean currents, and the special shape of the ocean floor all work together,
01:48moving heat and salt up to the surface.
01:51In Science Talk, this swirling movement is called an Ekman transport.
01:56Ekman transport is what happens when wind messes with the surface of the ocean.
02:00When the wind blows across the water, it creates friction that grabs onto the top layer and pulls it along.
02:07Thanks to the Coriolis effect, which comes from Earth's spinning,
02:11the moving water gets pushed at a 90-degree angle from the wind's direction.
02:16So, instead of the water going exactly where the wind is pushing it, it drifts off at an angle.
02:21Which way it turns depends on which half of the planet you're on.
02:25In the Northern Hemisphere, the water shifts clockwise from the wind direction.
02:30And in the Southern Hemisphere, it shifts counterclockwise.
02:34Now, Ekman transport turned out to be the missing piece of the puzzle in the case of the Maud rise
02:40hole.
02:40It helped balance the salt levels and keep mixing salt and heat up to the ocean surface.
02:46But as the sea ice melts, the surface water becomes less salty, which should stop the mixing.
02:52So, the scientists realized something else had to be happening to keep the Polyneia open.
02:58There had to be another source of salt.
03:01Salt lowers the freezing point of water.
03:03To find out where this extra salt was coming from,
03:06the team dug back into their data and ran more computer models on the ocean.
03:11They found that swirling currents formed as the Waddell current flows around Maud rise.
03:17These currents carry salt up to the top of the underwater mountain.
03:21From there, Ekman transport kicks in.
03:24As the top layer of water moves away with the wind, water from deeper down rises to take its place.
03:31At Maud rise, this upwelling water brings along the extra salty water buildup around the seamount.
03:37And that's what helps keep the Polyneia from freezing over.
03:42Scientists follow any changes in Antarctica as they influence the rest of the world.
03:47Researchers at Stanford University used machine learning for the first time to study detailed satellite data,
03:54showing how ice moves in the polar region.
03:57They combined huge amounts of real-world data with physics rules to understand the Antarctic ice sheet better.
04:04It's the biggest ice mass on Earth, almost twice as large as Australia.
04:08It acts like a giant sponge for the planet, storing fresh water as ice and stabilizing sea levels.
04:16Scientists used to rely on models based on lab experiments.
04:19But real Antarctic ice is way more complex, with cracks, air pockets, and different types of ice that behave unpredictably.
04:28Instead of trying to model every little detail, the team trained a machine learning model using data from 2007 to
04:362018.
04:37It looked at five major ice shelves and created new models showing the ice's resistance to flow.
04:44They found that near the land, the ice is compressed and behaves as in lab predictions.
04:50But farther out, the ice is stretched toward the ocean and acts differently depending on direction.
04:56Less than 5% of the ice shelf is compressed.
04:59The other 95% behaves in a way old models didn't fully explain.
05:05This research could seriously improve our predictions of how Antarctica might change in the future.
05:11Another recent piece of big scientific news from Antarctica changes the history of birds as we know it.
05:18For a long time, it was simple.
05:20Dinosaurs ruled the Earth until an asteroid hit 66 million years ago and wiped them all out.
05:27Except for some avian dinosaurs, which eventually became birds like eagles and chickens.
05:33Now, scientists have found a headless fossil of a VYI on Vega Island in Antarctica.
05:40The fossil was 68 million years old, at least 2 million years older than the asteroid strike.
05:46Without a skull, it was unclear what modern birds VYI might be related to, and guesses included waterfowl and shorebirds.
05:56Nearly 20 years later, another expedition found a bird's skull in Antarctica.
06:01After careful study, scientists matched it to VYI and concluded it was an ancestor of modern waterbirds like loons and
06:10greaves.
06:11If it's all true, VYI is now the oldest known modern bird in fossil records.
06:17The skull had a long pointed beak, a brain unlike any other Mesozoic bird, and signs of strong jaw muscles
06:25like mine, which were perfect for diving underwater and catching fish.
06:29The body fossil also had adaptations for underwater swimming, similar to modern diving birds.
06:36During the late Cretaceous period, Antarctica was a temperate rainforest, far from the Yucatan, so it could have become a
06:44safe haven during the asteroid disaster.
06:47So, early modern birds might have survived there.
06:51When a giant iceberg, about the size of Chicago, broke off from Antarctica's massive ice shelf, scientists nearby did something
07:00no one had ever done before.
07:01They sailed straight over to check out the newly exposed seafloor.
07:07Studying the undersides of ice shelves is incredibly hard, but thanks to the iceberg A84, a 209-square-mile patch
07:16of seafloor suddenly opened wide for exploration.
07:20The scientists deployed all their high-tech gear, including a remotely operated submersible and autonomous robots, to collect data about
07:29the seafloor and the properties of the water above it.
07:32Life exists almost everywhere in the ocean, from the bright, shallow waters to the pitch-black, volcanic deep sea.
07:40But the research team was really surprised to find such a diversity of life down there.
07:45They found a forest of sponges, giant sea spiders, ice fish, octopuses, huge corals, anemones, and even glowing deep-sea
07:55jellyfish.
07:57Normally, deep-sea creatures get their nutrients from organic matter falling from the ocean surface.
08:02But under a 500-foot-thick sheet of ice that had been there for who knows how long, that wasn't
08:09possible.
08:09That meant the creatures had to be getting their nutrients in some completely different way.
08:15To figure out how long this hidden ecosystem had been around, the scientists studied the sea sponges.
08:22Sponges grow extremely slowly, only about an inch per year.
08:26But the ones they found were huge, so they must have been growing there for decades or even centuries.
08:32The team is hoping that the mountain of ocean and environmental data they collected during the expedition
08:37will help them understand how these ecosystems managed to thrive in those conditions
08:42and maybe reveal some completely new species that no one has ever seen before.
08:48India could split horizontally into two parts as it runs into Eurasia.
08:53The movement of the Indian plate that includes most of modern South Asia is causing the Himalayas to grow.
09:00This process started around 60 million years ago when the plate first bumped into Eurasia.
09:07Scientists from the Netherlands have used the power of an AI simulator to see what this region will look like
09:13one day.
09:14The computer model showed that the Indian subcontinent will merge with the Horn of Africa in approximately 200 million years.
09:23The present-day cities of Mumbai and Mogadishu will become next-door neighbors.
09:28They will sit along the newly formed mountain chain scientists provisionally named the Somalaya.
09:34On the other side of this geological formation, Madagascar will connect with Sumatra,
09:40while Kolkata and the island of Meridias will occupy the same region.
09:44Sri Lanka would cease to exist as it becomes part of the Indian mainland.
09:49Further to the north, scientists predict that the Himalayas are going to increase in height in the foreseeable future.
09:56As the Indian plate continues to mile northward, there will be major changes to the surrounding landscape.
10:02The present fault line will drift further south.
10:06Tens of thousands of years in the future, there might be no Nepal.
10:10The Himalayan range will have expanded sideways to fully engulf the mountainous country.
10:16And there may be way more earthquakes in this part of the world because of this movement.
10:23Most researchers agree the speed at which India is moving northward into Eurasia is barely a tenth of an inch
10:29every year.
10:30Some of them think this is happening because of the plate's buoyancy.
10:34It prevents the Indian plate from sinking into the mantle, which gives Tibet its elevated topography.
10:41Other scholars believe that the structure is buckling under the pressure.
10:45The process resembles what happens to a sheet of paper when you push it horizontally against a wall.
10:51As you apply more pressure to its edge, the sheet starts to rise in the middle.
10:56In the real world, this bulge would be the Tibetan plateau.
11:01A recent theory gives us the third explanation for the process.
11:05Their paper still has to undergo peer review, but the findings are intriguing.
11:10The international team of researchers introduced a new concept, the delamination of the Indian plate.
11:16This term simply means the separation of layers in a material that is supposed to be bonded together.
11:23Think of a sandwich that has cheese and ham slices between two buns.
11:27Take one of those layers out of the sandwich and you get delamination.
11:33In geological terms, this process involves the upper part of the plate peeling off and moving upwards.
11:40In the case of the Indian plate, this is the section that supports Tibet's elevation.
11:45The lower section is denser, which causes it to sink into the mantle.
11:50Plate tectonics are, in this way, similar to a layered cake.
11:54Chefs place the spongy, denser layer at the bottom, so the heavier top doesn't crush it.
12:00Scientists developed their thesis by analyzing helium gases in water samples from the region's hot springs.
12:07Helium-3 is a rare isotope that shows that the mantle is close to the surface of the Earth.
12:13Researchers measured helium isotope ratios at 200 Tibetan springs.
12:18The pattern they saw shows how close the mantle is to the northern Tibetan surface.
12:24Further to the south, they found plenty of helium-4, another isotope, which means that the plate is intact.
12:30It forms a barrier that helium-3 cannot penetrate, except in one region near Bhutan, in the eastern part of
12:38the Himalayas.
12:40The seismic activity in the region is good proof that delamination, the sandwich theory, is all real here.
12:47And it shows us that the mantle is intruding from the eastern side of the plateau.
12:52This concept puts under question the old, established ideas about tectonic plate behavior.
12:58The scientists behind the study suspect that the unique shape of the Indian plate contributes to the delamination process.
13:06It's the thickest at the northernmost point and the thinnest on the sides.
13:11If it's all true, it will mean that the continental collisions have a more dynamic and complex nature than geologists
13:17previously believed.
13:20Scientists still don't have enough hard evidence to prove the correctness of the new theory, just hints.
13:25Drilling to depths of over 60 miles is mechanically impossible right now.
13:31Such excavations are necessary to be 100% sure that the delamination process is going on.
13:38With the right technology, we would be able to better understand the hazards associated with earthquakes in the Asia-Pacific
13:45region.
13:46It's home to the famous Ring of Fire, where 75% of Earth's volcanoes are located.
13:539 out of 10 all earthquakes take place here.
13:57The India-Australia Capricorn tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean is also important for solving Earth's tectonic mysteries.
14:05The term geophysicists use for such locations is nascent plate boundary.
14:10These are plates where tectonic plates are just starting to pull apart, or push against each other.
14:16They represent the initial stage of a full-fledged plate boundary.
14:21Such a geological transformation unfolds at a pace of barely 5% of a single inch per year.
14:28That's about as long as a strand of spaghetti is wide.
14:32This shouldn't worry us too much from today's perspective.
14:36The India-Australia Capricorn plate is destined to split in half over the course of tens of millions of years.
14:44Scientists from France studied records of two earthquakes that happened in 2012 and concluded there must be a nascent boundary
14:52there.
14:53Earthquakes normally occur at places where two or more tectonic plates meet.
14:57But the tremors in the Indian Ocean happened in the middle of the plate.
15:02The scientists used sonar scanning to map out the seafloor and see what was really going on there.
15:09After further examination of the marine area off the coast of Western Australia,
15:14researchers found a complex network of 62 pull-apart basins along a fracture zone.
15:20The scientific data backed up the idea that the tectonic plate was slowly but surely breaking apart.
15:27It's another proof that the outer layer of our planet is dynamic, not static.
15:33In some cases, you don't have to be a scientist to notice these powerful underground forces.
15:39Massive crevices emerged almost overnight due to heavy rainfall in a seismically active region in rural Kenya.
15:47First in 2018 and then again in 2023.
15:50The local population named the biggest of them the Grand Kenya.
15:55These events were not one-time incidents, but signals from the East African Rift System, part of the Great Rift
16:02Valley.
16:03This huge geological phenomenon stretching from Jordan to Mozambique shows us the gradual splitting of the African continent into two
16:12subcontinents.
16:14You can find rift valleys all around the world as proof of how tectonic plate movements are changing the planet.
16:22The East African Rift shows the underlying dynamics of the Nubian and Somali plates.
16:28The Nubian plate bears most of Africa, and the smaller, Somali plate cradles the Horn of Africa.
16:34The two are gradually moving away from one another, which causes the formation of crevices within the rift valley.
16:42This process of continental rifting, going on at a rate slightly faster than the one in India, will eventually lead
16:49to the split of Africa into two continents.
16:52The whole process, which is about to happen in the next 10 to 50 million years, marks a significant geological
16:59event that reminds us of Earth's historical transformations.
17:04The last time our planet's geography changed so drastically was during the Jurassic period.
17:09The world map from the period looks recognizable, but the landmasses were oddly positioned from the modern perspective.
17:17In the north, Eurasia was still loosely connected to North America, which was at the time called Lurasia.
17:24This landmass was slowly moving away from the supercontinent of Gondwana, further down south.
17:30It consisted of what we know today as Africa, South America, Australia, and Antarctica.
17:36At the time, the Indian plate was closer to Madagascar than to Eurasia, as it is today.
17:46Imagine there is a huge crevice right under your house.
17:50What would you do?
17:51Probably pick up your belongings and evacuate the structure.
17:54This is what happened to one Kenyan back in 2018.
17:58A massive crevice formed almost overnight under his home.
18:02The man escaped to safety, but the event revealed a deeper issue.
18:06Much deeper than most people thought.
18:09The crevice appeared after a month of heavy rainfall.
18:13This part of the country, west of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, sits in a seismically active region.
18:19The massive hole in the ground was covered with ash from a nearby dormant volcano.
18:24The crevice in the ground ran for miles, and it was 65 feet wide in some places.
18:30It was as deep as the Hollywood sign is tall.
18:32The gaping hole damaged a vital local road.
18:36People soon dubbed it the Grand Kenyan.
18:40But this is no laughing matter.
18:42The same thing happened in 2023.
18:44Kenya's highway authority had to close the busy road for repairs once again.
18:49Preliminary reports showed that heavy rains were the likeliest cause.
18:53The rupture itself is part of the Great Rift Valley.
18:56It extends from Jordan in the north to Mozambique in eastern Africa.
19:01Its total length is nearly one and a half times the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
19:10Rift valleys are located all over the planet.
19:13They're lowland places where tectonic plates move apart or rift.
19:18These are huge slabs of rock in Earth's outermost layer.
19:23They rest on molten rock underneath, which makes them unstable.
19:27Tectonic plates are constantly on the move.
19:30They can bump into each other or one plate can go under another.
19:34This can occur both on land and at the bottom of the ocean.
19:39Continental rifts are less frequent than the ones we find underwater.
19:43The East African Rift is one of four major ones.
19:47The nearby Arabian plate has been on the move for the last 30 million years.
19:53When it separated from the African mainland, it created the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
19:59When you look at the physical map of Africa, it looks like one contiguous landmass.
20:05But when you dig deeper, quite literally, you realize it rests on two tectonic plates.
20:11The Nubian one carries most of the continent.
20:14The smaller, Somali plate holds the Horn of Africa.
20:18The crevice in Kenya appeared in the rift valley between these two plates.
20:22That's because they're moving away from each other.
20:25The rift is growing larger, which means that one day the African continent will split into two.
20:33The rifting process is a slow one.
20:35The present rate is just a quarter of an inch every year.
20:39Scientists estimate that the split will occur in 5 to 10 million years.
20:44Some experts place this event 50 million years into the future.
20:48The end result will be two African subcontinents.
20:52They will be separated by a body of water that will become our planet's sixth ocean.
20:58This also means that five, now landlocked countries, will get access to the sea.
21:05When they get in coastline, the countries could build harbors to trade with the rest of the world.
21:09Three other countries, including Kenya, would find themselves on two continents.
21:16The future split of Africa into two parts might sound dramatic at first, but it wouldn't be unnatural.
21:23This is the first time, after hundreds of millions of years, that the shape of Earth would change so much.
21:29The last time this happened was during the Jurassic period.
21:33If you're now thinking of Steven Spielberg's 1993 blockbuster movie, you're right!
21:39The world of dinosaurs had a different shape than the one we're familiar with today.
21:44There was a supercontinent called Gondwana.
21:48It included today's South America, Antarctica, India, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, and Australia.
21:56Then, around 180 million years ago, things started to change.
22:02Earth was starting to take its familiar shape.
22:05The Indian subcontinent collided with the Asian mainland.
22:08The event gave rise to the Himalayan mountain range.
22:12These are the highest mountains in the world, with 30 peaks over 24,000 feet in altitude.
22:19This process is far from over.
22:22The Himalayas are still growing in height.
22:26On the other side of Gondwana, Africa and South America first separated together.
22:31But they weren't meant to last long.
22:3440 million years later, South America started drifting away from Africa.
22:39This created the South Atlantic Ocean.
22:42The evidence of this ancient continental drift is obvious to this day.
22:47If you look at the map of South America, you'll notice a bulge in its eastern part.
22:52That's the modern country of Brazil.
22:55On the other side of the Atlantic, Africa has a huge inland curve on its western side.
23:00The two act as pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle.
23:04They roughly fit into one another.
23:07European scientists noticed this as early as the 17th century.
23:11Further research confirmed the theory that South America and Africa once belonged to the same landmass.
23:19This is only one part of the story.
23:22At the beginning of the 20th century, a German scientist came up with the theory of continental drift.
23:28He believed that all of Earth's continents were once part of a supercontinent called Pangea.
23:34The name comes from Greek, and it means all of the Earth.
23:39Makes sense, doesn't it?
23:40It was surrounded by the oceanic ancestor of the Pacific Ocean.
23:45Some 200 million years ago, this gigantic landmass was home to many animal and plant species.
23:52Thanks to them, scientists could piece together what our planet used to look like.
23:56For example, Mesosaurus was a giant freshwater reptile that existed during the Cretaceous period.
24:04Paleontologists found its fossils in only two places, Africa and South America.
24:10The animal lived in fresh water, so there was no way it could have swam in the Atlantic Ocean.
24:15This pointed to the fact that it lived in a single habitat, rich in rivers and lakes.
24:21This would have been possible in only one scenario.
24:25The two continents that are now miles apart were once a single piece of land.
24:34Pangea wasn't the only supercontinent in Earth's history.
24:38Continents came together and drifted apart several times throughout our planet's past.
24:43Researchers know of at least three times this happened.
24:48Pangea formed 600 million years ago.
24:51Rodinia was an even older supercontinent.
24:54It existed a billion years ago.
24:57The driving force behind all these changes was tectonic activity.
25:02Plates deep beneath our feet have the ability to create new land and oceans.
25:07This is what's happening in East Africa right now.
25:11This activity is most evident at the bottom of the sea.
25:15Molten rock rises from deep within the Earth to create new seafloor.
25:20The process is called seafloor spreading.
25:23It happens along underwater mountains called ridges.
25:27One example is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
25:30I think you can fairly accurately guess its location.
25:33Over time, the seafloor grows wider here.
25:37This has an effect on the continents on both sides of the ridge.
25:41Seafloor spreading causes continents to move away from each other.
25:45Right now, North America is moving away from Europe at a rate of one inch per year.
25:52This doesn't seem like much, but give it 50 million years and the Americas are gonna bump into the western
25:59part of Asia.
26:00The two landmasses will form a new supercontinent.
26:05Geologists from Yale University have a name for this land.
26:09Amazia.
26:10Talk about rushing before the ore.
26:12They ran a series of computer simulations to see what Earth would look like millions of years from now.
26:18The new continent is likely going to form somewhere around the North Pole.
26:23But don't go shopping for winter clothes just yet.
26:26The time frame for this event might extend to 200 million years into the future.
26:32The largest volcanic region on Earth is not in Africa or Japan, but under the ice of Antarctica.
26:39Scientists found 138 volcanoes in its western part.
26:43And if they decide to go wild, you'll surely notice it.
26:47They could melt huge amounts of ice that will move into the ocean, raise its level, and make our planet
26:52uninhabitable for humans.
26:54But before you pack your things to fly away to another planet, hear me out.
26:58Only two of the Antarctic volcanoes are officially classified as active now.
27:04And it would take a whole series of eruptions, decade after decade, to seriously impact the whole world.
27:11Mount Erebus, one of the two Antarctic volcanoes currently in action, proudly bears the title of the world's southernmost active
27:19one.
27:20It has been continuously erupting since at least 1972.
27:23It emits plumes of gas and steam and sometimes even spews out rocks.
27:28And scientists call it strombolian eruptions.
27:31One of the coolest features is a lava lake in one of its summit craters, with molten material on the
27:37surface.
27:38Such lakes are rather rare, because they need certain conditions to make sure the surface never freezes over.
27:44The second active volcano is Deception Island, a horseshoe-shaped landmass.
27:49It is the caldera of an active volcano that last erupted over 50 years ago.
27:55Scientists who monitor it say it shouldn't go wild anytime soon.
27:59Antarctica also has plenty of fumaroles.
28:02Those are volcanic vents that release gases and vapors into the air.
28:06In the right conditions, they can spew out enough stuff to build fumarolic ice towers up to 10 feet tall.
28:14Scientists keep an eye on the Antarctic volcanoes with seismometers that detect when the Earth starts trembling from volcanic activity.
28:22Sometimes, they also use more complicated tech.
28:24But it's all really challenging because of how far away this polar region is and how tricky it is to
28:30get there.
28:31That's why no one can predict when one of the continent's volcanoes that are now sleeping might erupt.
28:36We can guess what this waking up would look like if we analyzed the events from nearly 20,000 years
28:43ago.
28:43So, shall we?
28:46One of Antarctica's sleeping volcanoes, Mount Takahe, had a series of eruptions and spewed out a good amount of halogens
28:53rich in ozone back then.
28:56Some scientists say these events warmed up the southern hemisphere.
28:59Glaciers started to melt and help finish the last ice age.
29:03For these events to repeat, we'd need a series of eruptions with substances rich in halogens from one or more
29:09volcanoes that are now above the ice.
29:12It's an unlikely scenario, but since it already happened in the past, it's not completely impossible.
29:19As for volcanoes hiding under a thick layer of ice, it looks like their gases would hardly make it to
29:25the atmosphere.
29:25But they would be strong enough to melt huge caverns in the base of the ice and produce a serious
29:31amount of meltwater.
29:33The West Antarctic ice sheet is wet and not frozen to its bed, so this meltwater would work as a
29:39lubricant and set the overlying ice into motion soon.
29:42The volume of water that even a large volcano would generate in this way is nothing compared to the volume
29:49of ice beneath it.
29:50So, a single eruption wouldn't make a difference.
29:53But several volcanoes erupting close to or beneath any of the western Antarctica's big ice streams would.
30:00Those ice streams are rivers of ice that take most of the frozen water in Antarctica into the ocean.
30:06If they change their speed and bring unusual amounts of water into the ocean, its level will rise.
30:13As the ice would get thinner and thinner, there would be more and more new eruptions.
30:17Scientists call it a runaway effect.
30:20Something like that happened in Iceland.
30:22The number of volcanic eruptions went up when glaciers started to recede at the end of the last ice age.
30:29So, it looks like, for massive changes, several powerful volcanoes above the ice with gases full of halogens need to
30:37get active within a few decades of each other and stay strong over many tens to hundreds of years.
30:43Antarctica stores around 80% of all the fresh water in the world.
30:47And if they melted all of it, global sea levels would rise by almost 200 feet.
30:53And then we'd have to look for a new planet to live on.
30:56But this, again, is an unlikely scenario.
30:59It's more likely that the eruptions under the ice will lubricate ice streams and seep water into the ocean.
31:05But it wouldn't be the end of the world.
31:09A super-strong, super-angry, super-volcano could do it, though.
31:13And it has already happened in the past.
31:16Over 200 million years ago, the world went through a major makeover with not one, not two,
31:22but four massive volcanic eruptions and huge pulses.
31:26The super-volcano, called Ham, had been erupting over and over for 600,000 years.
31:33It all happened in Rangelia, a large chunk of land that used to be a super-massive volcano
31:38stretching across what's now British Columbia and Alaska.
31:42And it wasn't the lava or the volcanic ash that ruined the environment.
31:46The eruption made carbon levels skyrocket.
31:49The planet would never be the same again.
31:51This volcanic activity might have helped dinosaurs grow from cat-sized critters
31:56into giants we saw in Jurassic Park.
31:58It kicked off a 2-million-year rainy season.
32:01It made the whole world hot and humid.
32:04And the dinos just loved it.
32:06Researchers dug deep into sediment layers beneath an ancient lake in Asia to uncover these secrets.
32:12They found traces of volcanic ash and mercury, clear signs of those epic eruptions.
32:17There were carbon signatures showing huge spikes in carbon dioxide levels.
32:22It made the atmosphere toasty, and the rain poured down.
32:26So the bad news is, another eruption like this could happen.
32:31The super-volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park has been sleeping for nearly 70,000 years.
32:37But if it wakes up, it would be many times more catastrophic than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in
32:441980.
32:45It's considered the most disastrous volcanic eruption in U.S. history.
32:49It followed two months of earthquakes and injection of magma below the volcano
32:53that weakened and destroyed the entire north face of the mountain.
32:57The eruption column went 80,000 feet into the atmosphere and spread ash over 11 U.S. states and several
33:04Canadian provinces.
33:05The last Yellowstone eruption was 1,000 times greater than that.
33:11The ground above Yellowstone sits on a hot spot made of molten and semi-molten rock called magma.
33:17This magma stuff flows into a chamber beneath the park, about 4 to 6 miles down,
33:22making the ground puff up like a balloon.
33:25But then, as it cools down, the ground goes back to its usual state.
33:29Volcano watchers have been keeping an eye on this for a century.
33:33They noticed the ground lift up about 10 inches around 20 years ago.
33:37But since 2010, it's been going back down.
33:40The experts say we have no big eruptions on the horizon, so doomsday isn't coming anytime soon.
33:46But there's some underground activity going on lately which keeps us interested.
33:51Since humans haven't been around to witness every little thing Yellowstone does,
33:56it's kind of tough to say for sure what's brewing down there.
34:00Yellowstone has had some epic eruptions within the last couple million years.
34:04They happen like clockwork, with gaps of 600,000 to 800,000 years between them.
34:09The last big one was around 640,000 years ago, and it basically reshaped the entire landscape,
34:16spreading ash and debris as far as Louisiana.
34:19You can still see the aftermath of the last big eruption in the Yellowstone caldera today.
34:24Experts say a massive eruption, like the last one, is an unlikely scenario.
34:29We're more likely to see eruptions of steam and hot water or lava flows.
34:33When and with what force it will wake up remains a mystery to scientists.
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