Something's hiding below the ice in Antarctica….
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In 1970, a team of Soviet scientists started drilling. For 28 years, they kept going… until after nearly 4,000 meters… they suddenly stopped. Because they’d found something unimaginable: Liquid water. A secret lake, down below all this ice, that had been completely sealed off from the rest of the world for 15 million years.
How? And… is there something alive in there? Creatures that have been evolving separately from the rest of the planet for 15 million years?
#Antarctica #Mystery #Documentary #HiddenWorld #EarthMysteries #Science #AntarcticaSecrets #Discovery #FrozenContinent #Exploration
Scientists started searching for more of these secret lakes, and as they did, they realized there is way more going on under Antarctica than we ever thought.
I needed to know the truth about Earth’s most remote continent. So I've come all the way to Antarctica to show you what's really happening down below this ice. And exactly what they discovered when they finally broke inside…
Chapters:
00:00 What’s hiding under Antarctica?
01:50 How thick is the ice in Antarctica?
2:30 What if you dig a hole into Antarctica?
4:13 What’s inside a crevasse?
4:56 How do we know what’s under the ice?
6:24 What if you go deeper?
07: 18 How old is the ice under Antarctica?
10:33 Why are there lakes under Antarctica's ice?
13:31 How can we study the subglacial lakes?
15:19 Did we find new life under Antarctica?
16:52 Can research in Antarctica help us find aliens in space?
17:41 What don’t we know?
18:12 What's next?
18:22 :)
Special thanks to Dr. Steven Chown, Rebecca Warne and all of the amazing guides from the White Desert Foundation leading Science Week .
Gear I use:
Camera: Sony A7SIII
Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM
Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX and Zoom H4N Pro
Music: Musicbed, Tom Fox
Hey, welcome to the joke down low!
Why do polar bears and penguins not get on?
Because they are polar opposites!
Find a way to use “penguin” in a comment to let me know you’re a real one who made it to the end of the description :)
Cleo Abram travels to Antarctica to explore the hidden world beneath its massive ice sheets. Through scientific research, advanced drilling technology, and satellite data, experts investigat
For optimistic science and tech stories, subscribe!
In 1970, a team of Soviet scientists started drilling. For 28 years, they kept going… until after nearly 4,000 meters… they suddenly stopped. Because they’d found something unimaginable: Liquid water. A secret lake, down below all this ice, that had been completely sealed off from the rest of the world for 15 million years.
How? And… is there something alive in there? Creatures that have been evolving separately from the rest of the planet for 15 million years?
#Antarctica #Mystery #Documentary #HiddenWorld #EarthMysteries #Science #AntarcticaSecrets #Discovery #FrozenContinent #Exploration
Scientists started searching for more of these secret lakes, and as they did, they realized there is way more going on under Antarctica than we ever thought.
I needed to know the truth about Earth’s most remote continent. So I've come all the way to Antarctica to show you what's really happening down below this ice. And exactly what they discovered when they finally broke inside…
Chapters:
00:00 What’s hiding under Antarctica?
01:50 How thick is the ice in Antarctica?
2:30 What if you dig a hole into Antarctica?
4:13 What’s inside a crevasse?
4:56 How do we know what’s under the ice?
6:24 What if you go deeper?
07: 18 How old is the ice under Antarctica?
10:33 Why are there lakes under Antarctica's ice?
13:31 How can we study the subglacial lakes?
15:19 Did we find new life under Antarctica?
16:52 Can research in Antarctica help us find aliens in space?
17:41 What don’t we know?
18:12 What's next?
18:22 :)
Special thanks to Dr. Steven Chown, Rebecca Warne and all of the amazing guides from the White Desert Foundation leading Science Week .
Gear I use:
Camera: Sony A7SIII
Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM
Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX and Zoom H4N Pro
Music: Musicbed, Tom Fox
Hey, welcome to the joke down low!
Why do polar bears and penguins not get on?
Because they are polar opposites!
Find a way to use “penguin” in a comment to let me know you’re a real one who made it to the end of the description :)
Cleo Abram travels to Antarctica to explore the hidden world beneath its massive ice sheets. Through scientific research, advanced drilling technology, and satellite data, experts investigat
Category
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TVTranscript
00:01Ready?
00:06When you fly over Antarctica, all you see is white.
00:13You don't hear any birds. You don't see any plants.
00:17It looks empty.
00:20But there's something hiding down below this ice.
00:24In 1970, a group of Soviet scientists started drilling right here.
00:30For 28 years, they kept going and going
00:33until after nearly 4,000 meters, they suddenly stopped
00:39because they had found something unimaginable.
00:43Liquid water.
00:45A secret lake down below all this ice
00:48that had been completely sealed off from the rest of the world
00:53for 15 million years.
00:56How?
00:56And is there something alive in there?
01:01Creatures that have been evolving separately
01:03from the rest of the planet for 15 million years?
01:07So scientists started searching for more of these secret lakes.
01:11And as they did, they realized there is way more going on
01:16under Antarctica than we ever thought.
01:20I needed to know the truth about Earth's most remote continent.
01:25So I've come all the way to Antarctica
01:28to show you what's really happening down below this ice
01:33and exactly what they discovered when they finally broke inside.
01:39Bring out the drill!
01:49Ready?
01:50If you wanted to drill to the bottom of Antarctica,
01:53the first thing you need to realize is
01:55this ice is way thicker than you think.
01:58If we were to take a chunk out of this ice
02:00and place it on the surface at its thickest,
02:03it would be this tall.
02:07Wow.
02:08That's nearly the height of Mount Kilimanjaro.
02:11You would have to stack the tallest building in the world
02:14six times to reach the top of that.
02:17And this isn't just one uniform block.
02:20It's full of all different kinds of ice.
02:23And if you looked into the hole left behind by our chunk,
02:27you'd see land.
02:29So as we start drilling,
02:31at first we're passing through snow,
02:33which is surprisingly scarce here
02:35because Antarctica is the driest, coldest, windiest continent on Earth.
02:40It's technically a desert.
02:43I can confirm it is very cold and very windy.
02:47On average, it only snows a couple centimeters a year here,
02:50meaning the snow just a few feet under your boots could be from a decade ago.
02:54But as our drill makes its way through this snow,
02:56the texture starts to change.
02:58The snow then of course keeps accumulating
03:01and the deeper layers become consolidated into fern.
03:04That's Dr. Steven Chown, a biologist who specializes in life on Antarctica.
03:09He's leading the trip I'm on with the White Desert Foundation's Science Week.
03:13It supports scientific research in Antarctica.
03:15The fern that he's talking about is the stage between snow and ice.
03:20It looks like a frozen sponge.
03:21So we're drilling through this frozen sponge,
03:23and before we reach the point where it actually turns into ice,
03:27we hit something...
03:28alarm-y.
03:34I don't know why driving over it feels so much scarier than walking over it,
03:39but it really does.
03:40The reason to be scared is that as we're drilling through the fern,
03:43it's not staying still.
03:45As the snow and ice builds up,
03:47its own weight slowly pushes it over the land toward the coasts,
03:51and then as it reaches the end of the continent,
03:53it leaves the land and extends out over the ocean.
03:56That's called the ice shelf.
03:58The problem is,
03:59as this giant ice sheet slowly flows across the rocky ground,
04:03it stretches and contracts.
04:06And if it stretches too fast,
04:08the fern snaps.
04:10Creating.
04:12I'm about to go down into that crevasse.
04:15You'd never know it was here.
04:16Oh my god.
04:18This is a little bit of a test of my claustrophobia.
04:23Bye.
04:25Into the darkness we go.
04:28Whoa, it's huge.
04:32This is incredible.
04:37You would never think this is down here.
04:39Look how deep this is.
04:40You would not want to fall down into one of these.
04:43I'm gonna,
04:45I'm gonna get out now.
04:47This is the amount of time
04:48that I want to spend underground.
04:51So to not fall into a crevasse,
04:53and to know what's coming down below us,
04:55we need to do a lot of prep.
04:57So back in the 1950s,
04:58scientists would explode TNT on the surface
05:01to measure the seismic waves that would bounce back through the ice.
05:05Today, they shoot lasers from satellites that bounce off the surface,
05:10and any wrinkles or sagging give us hints at what's below.
05:15TNT, space lasers, scientists are awesome.
05:20But to really get underneath in detail,
05:23they mostly shoot ice-penetrating radar down from planes,
05:27like this plane.
05:28They crisscross the continent,
05:30filling in a picture of what's really underneath Antarctica.
05:34And what they can now see is the outline of an ancient world.
05:44It's not flat.
05:46There's a trench deeper than the Grand Canyon,
05:49a completely hidden mountain range that rivals the European Alps,
05:53evidence of a massive impact crater,
05:56and the largest volcanic region on Earth.
06:00But in the late 60s,
06:01as they were flying these ice-penetrating radar planes,
06:04they suddenly spotted something especially strange.
06:08They also saw these weird depressions, a really big one.
06:10Like flat spots.
06:11Yeah, sort of a tiny depression.
06:14That earlier research with the TNT
06:15had hinted that there was something odd here too.
06:18And that Soviet drilling team,
06:20they're drilling right on top of it.
06:23So let's go deeper.
06:24The deeper we go, it's like we're going back in time.
06:28Layers upon layers stacked on top of each other.
06:31The pores in the spongy fern get squished,
06:35and the air inside gets locked in,
06:37creating little bubbles from that time in history.
06:40So now we're passing the Renaissance.
06:43The Roman Empire.
06:45Ancient Egypt.
06:46When humans started farming,
06:49there's the extinction of Neanderthals.
06:53And the first modern humans.
06:55And you can analyze that record by drilling a core
06:59all the way down through the ice.
07:02Wow, this is not easy.
07:05Is it going down?
07:07It is.
07:08I can't tell.
07:09Come on!
07:11Here we go.
07:13Oh, awesome!
07:15Oh ho!
07:19So here you can tell the story off the ice.
07:21So if you hold it up against the light,
07:23you can see some of the layers.
07:24You can see it!
07:25Wow!
07:28Look at all these bubbles!
07:30Those are pieces of atmosphere from decades or centuries ago.
07:34But it's not just bubbles.
07:35It's also sort of these tree rings of different,
07:38I don't know what to call it, shades of ice.
07:41Exactly, yeah.
07:42But if you hold it up,
07:43you can see that there are actually lines in it.
07:46Ice that forms in winter has a different texture
07:48and composition to summer ice,
07:50creating these lines.
07:51And you can count them like tree rings.
07:53But you can also see huge sudden changes.
07:57Where you can see certain events like a volcano eruption,
08:00for instance.
08:01Like this.
08:02That dark line is ash from a volcano eruption
08:05over 20,000 years ago.
08:08And as I was looking at these layers of exposed ice,
08:11I realized why scientists said
08:14we're not allowed to do something
08:16while we're hiking on Antarctica.
08:18This is why you can't pee on the ice.
08:20Because if you did, one day some descendant of yours
08:25would be taking an ice core in Antarctica,
08:28and they'd dig and dig and dig,
08:30and they'd pull it out,
08:31and they'd say, what's that yellow line?
08:33It's a funny way to understand
08:35what's really so important about this ice.
08:38It's this incredible record of Earth
08:40and life on Earth that we can learn from.
08:44For me, one of the most amazing core science things
08:48is that the team from Europe has found a core
08:52that's 1.3 million years.
08:55And they've pulled it out.
08:57They haven't yet analyzed it, but it's in the lab.
09:00Oh, that's so exciting. When can we expect it?
09:01I reckon in the next couple of years.
09:04Awesome.
09:05And that'll be the longest history of the planet's climate in ice.
09:13Oh, my God.
09:18As I was hiking, I said how lifeless everything looked.
09:22And then Dr. Chown told me to go find a white rock
09:26and look underneath it.
09:28It became kind of a mission as we were hiking around.
09:30And at first, I really didn't understand why.
09:33Miko, I went for a hike.
09:34I'm in Antarctica right now.
09:36And I was picking up white rocks.
09:39Why would under a white rock be a good place to find life
09:43as opposed to just under any rock?
09:45Those white rocks can let a little bit of light filter through,
09:49almost like a natural greenhouse effect
09:52for those tiny organisms underneath.
09:54It's a really neat adaptation.
09:55So this is Miko.
09:56It's like clippy, but way smarter.
09:59Actually, wait, hold on one second.
10:00There's a secret way to turn it into.
10:02Yeah!
10:03I find that talking out loud to it sometimes helps me
10:06figure out what I'm most interested in.
10:08And then I can go deeper into the research
10:09and figure out which way I want to go with the story.
10:11I'm still on the hunt for a white rock with life underneath.
10:15Now, we're almost at the lakes.
10:17At around 3,500 meters, or over two miles deep,
10:21the ice has completely changed.
10:23There are no bubbles.
10:25There's no dust.
10:26It's so clear you could read a book through it.
10:29This ice isn't coming from compressed fallen snow.
10:33It's coming from below.
10:35After decades of drilling and radar and seismic and satellite data,
10:39there was only one explanation.
10:42A lake.
10:42And not just any lake.
10:45It's huge.
10:47It's similar in size to Lake Ontario.
10:50By volume, this is the sixth largest lake in the world.
10:54It's called Lake Vostok.
10:58But wait, how could there be liquid water under all this ice?
11:02Well, for one, the ice is acting like a giant thermal blanket.
11:06Heat from Earth's core is held in place down here.
11:09But more importantly, sitting under all this ice is 350 times more pressure
11:15than what you feel at sea level.
11:17And as pressure rises, water stays liquid at lower temperatures.
11:23Which means a massive under ice lake is possible.
11:27So now the question is, if there's water down there, could there be life?
11:32And if it was isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years,
11:37what would it look like?
11:39With a drill poised right above it, they now have to decide.
11:43Should they poke it?
11:45They realized they could potentially go all the way through into the lake water.
11:50Was that risky?
11:51Yeah, totally.
11:52Nobody knew what would happen.
11:53Like, would it pressurize and blow everything out?
11:56Would it be really super dangerous?
12:00We actually looked at this very closely because we don't want to kill anybody.
12:04Oh, good.
12:05That's John Priske, one of the first scientists to study Lake Vostok.
12:09If you take a Pepsi bottle and you put in a Mentos,
12:12one of these little minty things, and blow it in, it just blows up.
12:15So that's what we're looking at.
12:17So Lake Vostok's got a lot of water.
12:19It'd be a blowout like a volcano.
12:20This took about 10 years to sort out.
12:23It took a good portion of my life.
12:25But during this time, studies kept finding more and more lakes, hundreds of them.
12:30And satellites revealed something very weird.
12:34The ice sheet was lifting and dropping almost 10 meters in some places.
12:40And Dr. Helen Fricker was the first to notice.
12:43Yeah, it was pretty incredible.
12:44It was one of those like jaw-dropping moments.
12:46While Vostok and other lakes like it sat sealed off,
12:49around the continent there were hundreds of other active lakes
12:52that can literally lift and drop parts of the ice sheet
12:56as they filled and drained into one another.
12:59And the first one that she saw was here.
13:02The whole lake shape looks like a footprint.
13:05So there aren't just lakes down there.
13:07It's an entire plumbing system under the ice, connected by rivers.
13:12So at this point, over a decade had passed since drilling had paused at Vostok.
13:16And we'd learned so much.
13:18So now, the plan wasn't for one country to drill into one lake.
13:22It was for three countries to drill into three lakes.
13:26The Russians into Lake Vostok.
13:28The British into Lake Ellsworth.
13:30And the Americans into Lake Willens.
13:32Time to poke an ancient lake.
13:34First up, the Russians.
13:36They had a massive head start with their effort to drill into Lake Vostok.
13:39But they had a problem.
13:40Their hole was already filled with drill fluid to prevent it from freezing.
13:44Specifically, kerosene.
13:46So to solve this problem, they added Freon, which is heavier.
13:49And the idea was that it would act like a plug.
13:51And then, they used this special drill with a heated tip
13:54to slowly melt into the surface of the lake.
13:57And as soon as they broke through, the pressurized water from the lake
14:00shot up over 30 meters into the hole, pushing the kerosene and the Freon away.
14:05I saw the videos and there was kerosene blowing out of the top of that hole.
14:08It was a little scary.
14:09I'd be running as fast as I could.
14:11They left that new lake water in the hole to freeze for a season.
14:15And then they pulled it up to study it.
14:17And the headlines said that they found a totally new type of bacteria.
14:21But those bacteria were suspiciously similar to the bacteria found in kerosene.
14:27The problem was that it mixed with the drilling fluid, which is highly contaminated.
14:31It's full of bacteria.
14:32They didn't publish anything.
14:34It was controversial because many people said they had contaminated with drill fluid.
14:40So the international science community was skeptical of the Russian find.
14:43But the British and the American teams were still trying to poke their legs.
14:47And they were using a different drilling tech that didn't use drill fluid, but super clean,
14:52hot water that was filtered and decontaminated with UV light.
14:56This boiling, pressurized water just blasts and melts away the ice.
15:00But it still needed fuel to power the thing.
15:03And the British team, they ran out.
15:06The other teams tried to help them get more fuel, but they couldn't.
15:11So now with only one team left, they slowly went deeper and deeper and deeper until finally.
15:21I remember breaking into the lake and you could hear the cheers.
15:25The whole roar went up. It was pretty, I had goosebumps and we broke through.
15:29So they bring up a sample of liquid water from this lake.
15:32And inside, they find life.
15:37Tons of life!
15:39A full ecosystem with colonies of bacteria and tiny organisms that were all thriving without sunlight.
15:47And in 2018, they did it again, here.
15:50This time sampling sediment too.
15:52Dr. Preskew gave us a sneak peek of the research that he's about to publish from that lake.
15:56And it seems to show that some of the life under Antarctica is genuinely new and different than anywhere else
16:05on Earth.
16:06We found some new kinds of viruses that are bacterial viruses.
16:10Don't worry. These are viruses that are specific to bacteria.
16:13They're not going to infect you. I was worried about that too.
16:15I want to study them. I just want to never get them.
16:18No, I don't think you're going to get them. I mean, I'm still alive.
16:23Do you think, do you think that there are larger animals down there that we haven't seen yet?
16:29Yeah, that's another, that's a good question.
16:31We looked around as we took an ROB and we had cameras going.
16:35So unless they were avoiding us, they're not.
16:38But that new microbial life is really special.
16:42Because while it's new to us.
16:44But Antarctica hasn't always been fully covered with ice.
16:47So maybe the new life we find is old life. Old new life.
16:51Using this new research, we can learn about the origins of life on our planet.
16:55And even beyond it.
16:58One of the coolest things about this story is that all of this science,
17:02all of this drilling through incredibly thick ice and not contaminating it or us,
17:07and all of this technology is exactly what we would use to explore the icy moons and planets for alien
17:15life.
17:16Finding life here makes many scientists think that we'll find it out there.
17:23Do you think that there is life on the icy moons like Europa?
17:27Yes. Yes, definitely.
17:30We found life in one of the coldest, darkest, most alien places on Earth.
17:36There are hundreds of other lakes still untouched.
17:40And while scientists think it's very unlikely that any of them contain larger life forms,
17:45what's inside is still a mystery.
17:48It's just cool. Science is amazing. Like, and humans are amazing at doing this.
17:52We have a whole lot more to explore.
17:55Exploring has never been easy.
17:57The teamwork involved, so many people involved.
18:00You know, it's just an incredible thing.
18:02But it's worth it.
18:04There are still untouched places left to be discovered.
18:08And new mysteries to solve.
18:12Huge inventory.
18:13We're making another episode all about what really happened with the ozone layer on Antarctica.
18:18And the current science happening right now.
18:20So if you want to know more, subscribe.
18:28We have been showing you the ancient aliens and the ice wall and the government conspiracies.
18:33The pyramids underneath.
18:34There's so much here.
18:35So like and subscribe.
18:36Like and subscribe because conspiracies are out there and they want you to know about them.
18:41We want, come to us and we will tell you.
18:44I think there's one of the aliens right now.
18:45That's, that's what you're hearing.
18:47Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:47Oh no, come on!
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