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00:00Ready?
00:05When you fly over Antarctica,
00:07all you see is white.
00:11You don't hear any birds.
00:14You don't see any plants.
00:16It looks empty.
00:18But there's something hiding down below this ice.
00:23In 1970, a group of Soviet scientists
00:26started drilling right here.
00:28For 28 years, they kept going and going
00:32until after nearly 4,000 meters,
00:36they suddenly stopped
00:38because they had found something unimaginable.
00:42Liquid water.
00:43A secret lake down below all this ice
00:47that had been completely sealed off
00:49from the rest of the world for 15 million years.
00:53How?
00:55And is there something alive in there?
00:59Creatures that have been evolving separately
01:01from the rest of the planet for 15 million years?
01:06So scientists started searching for more of these secret lakes.
01:09And as they did, they realized
01:11there is way more going on under Antarctica
01:16than we ever thought.
01:19I needed to know the truth
01:21about Earth's most remote continent.
01:24So I've come all the way to Antarctica
01:26to show you what's really happening
01:29down below this ice
01:31and exactly what they discovered
01:34when they finally broke inside.
01:37Bring out the drill!
01:47Ready?
01:48If you wanted to drill to the bottom of Antarctica,
01:51the first thing you need to realize
01:53is this ice is way thicker than you think.
01:56If we were to take a chunk out of this ice
01:58and place it on the surface at its thickest,
02:01it would be this tall.
02:05Wow.
02:06That's nearly the height of Mount Kilimanjaro.
02:10You would have to stack the tallest building in the world
02:13six times to reach the top of that.
02:16And this isn't just one uniform block.
02:19It's full of all different kinds of ice.
02:21And if you looked into the hole left behind by our trunk,
02:25you'd see land.
02:28So as we start drilling,
02:30at first we're passing through snow,
02:32which is surprisingly scarce here
02:34because Antarctica is the driest, coldest, windiest continent on Earth.
02:39It's technically a desert.
02:41I can confirm it is very cold and very windy.
02:46On average, it only snows a couple centimeters a year here,
02:49meaning the snow just a few feet under your boots
02:51could be from a decade ago.
02:52But as our drill makes its way through this snow,
02:55the texture starts to change.
02:56The snow then of course keeps accumulating
02:59and the deeper layers become consolidated into fern.
03:03That's Dr. Stephen Chown,
03:05a biologist who specializes in life on Antarctica.
03:08He's leading the trip I'm on with the White Desert Foundation's Science Week.
03:11It supports scientific research in Antarctica.
03:14The fern that he's talking about is the stage between snow and ice.
03:18It looks like a frozen sponge.
03:19So we're drilling through this frozen sponge,
03:22and before we reach the point where it actually turns into ice,
03:25we hit something alarm-y.
03:33I don't know why driving over it feels so much scarier than walking over it, but it really does.
03:38The reason to be scared is that as we're drilling through the fern,
03:41it's not staying still.
03:43As the snow and ice builds up,
03:45its own weight slowly pushes it over the land toward the coasts,
03:50and then as it reaches the end of the continent,
03:52it leaves the land and extends out over the ocean.
03:55That's called the ice shelf.
03:56The problem is, as this giant ice sheet slowly flows across the rocky ground,
04:02it stretches and contracts.
04:04And if it stretches too fast, the fern snaps.
04:09Creating.
04:11I'm about to go down into that crevasse.
04:13You'd never know it was here.
04:15Oh my god.
04:16This is a little bit of a test of my claustrophobia.
04:21Bye.
04:23Into the darkness we go.
04:26Whoa, it's huge.
04:31This is incredible.
04:36You would never think this was down here.
04:38Look how deep this is.
04:39You would not want to fall down into one of these.
04:42I'm gonna...
04:43I'm gonna get out now.
04:45This is the amount of time that I want to spend underground.
04:49So to not fall into a crevasse,
04:51and to know what's coming down below us,
04:53we need to do a lot of prep.
04:55So back in the 1950s,
04:57scientists would explode TNT on the surface
05:00to measure the seismic waves that would bounce back through the ice.
05:04Today, they shoot lasers from satellites that bounce off the surface.
05:09And any wrinkles or sagging give us hints at what's below.
05:13TNT, space lasers, scientists are awesome.
05:17Especially strange.
05:18I also saw these weird depressions, a really big one.
05:21Like flat spots.
05:22Yeah, sort of a tiny depression.
05:24That earlier research with the TNT had hinted that there was something odd here too.
05:29And that Soviet drilling team, they're drilling right on top of it.
05:33So let's go deeper.
05:35The deeper we go, it's like we're going back in time.
05:38Layers upon layers stacked on top of each other.
05:42The pores in the spongy fern get squished,
05:45and the air inside gets locked in,
05:47creating little bubbles from that time in history.
05:51So now we're passing the Renaissance,
05:54the Roman Empire,
05:55Ancient Egypt,
05:57when humans started farming.
06:00There's the extinction of Neanderthals,
06:03and the first modern humans.
06:06And you can analyze that record by drilling a core
06:10all the way down through the ice.
06:12Wow, this is not easy.
06:16Is it going down?
06:18It is.
06:18I can't tell.
06:20Come on!
06:21Oh, man!
06:24Oh, awesome!
06:30So here you can tell the story of the ice.
06:32So if you hold it up against the light...
06:34As I was looking at these layers of exposed ice,
06:37I realized why scientists said,
06:39we're not allowed to do something while we're hiking on Antarctica.
06:43This is why you can't pee on the ice.
06:45Because if you did,
06:47one day some descendant of yours would be taking an ice core in Antarctica,
06:54and they'd dig and dig and dig,
06:56and they'd pull it out,
06:56and they'd say,
06:57what's that yellow line?
06:59It's a funny way to understand what's really so important about this ice.
07:03It's this incredible record of Earth and life on Earth that we can learn from.
07:08For me, one of the most amazing core science things is that the team from Europe has found a core
07:17that's 1.3 million years, and they've pulled it out.
07:22They haven't yet analyzed it, but it's in the lab.
07:25Oh, that's so exciting.
07:26When can we expect it?
07:27I reckon in the next couple of years.
07:29Awesome!
07:30And that'll be the longest history of the planet's climate in ice.
07:43As I was hiking, I said how lifeless everything looked.
07:47And then Dr. Chown told me to go find a white rock and look underneath it.
07:53It became kind of a mission as we were hiking around.
07:55And at first, I really didn't understand why.
07:59Miko, I went for a hike. I'm in Antarctica right now.
08:01And I was picking up white...
08:04There's no dust. It's so clear you could read a book through it.
08:09This ice isn't coming from compressed, fallen snow.
08:12It's coming from below.
08:15After decades of drilling and radar and seismic and satellite data, there was only one explanation.
08:21A lake. And not just any lake. It's huge.
08:26It's similar in size to Lake Ontario. By volume, this is the sixth largest lake in the world.
08:34It's called Lake Vostok.
08:37But wait, how could there be liquid water under all this ice?
08:42Well, for one, the ice is acting like a giant thermal blanket.
08:46Heat from Earth's core is held in place down here.
08:48But more importantly, sitting under all this ice is 350 times more pressure than what you feel at sea level.
08:56And as pressure rises, water stays liquid at lower temperatures.
09:02Which means a massive under ice lake is possible.
09:07So now the question is, if there's water down there, could there be life?
09:11And if it was isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years, what would it look like?
09:18With a drill poised right above it, they now have to decide, should they poke it?
09:24And they realized they could potentially go all ways to drill into three lakes.
09:29The Russians into Lake Vostok.
09:31The British into Lake Ellsworth.
09:33And the Americans into Lake Willens.
09:35Time to poke an ancient lake.
09:37First up, the Russians.
09:39They had a massive head start with their effort to drill into Lake Vostok.
09:42But they had a problem.
09:44Their hole was already filled with drill fluid to prevent it from freezing.
09:47Specifically, kerosene.
09:49So to solve this problem, they added Freon, which is heavier.
09:52And the idea was that it would act like a plug.
09:54And then, they used a special drill with a heated tip to slowly melt into the surface of the lake.
10:00And as soon as they broke through, the pressurized water from the lake shot up over 30 meters into the
10:06hole.
10:06Pushing the kerosene and the Freon away.
10:08I saw the videos and there was kerosene blowing out of the top of that hole.
10:12It was a little scary. I'd be running as fast as I could.
10:14They left that new lake water in the hole to freeze for a season.
10:18And then they pulled it up to study it.
10:20And the headlines said that they found a totally new type of bacteria.
10:24But those bacteria were suspiciously similar to the bacteria found in kerosene.
10:30The problem was that it mixed with the drilling fluid, which is highly contaminated.
10:34It's full of bacteria.
10:36They didn't publish anything.
10:38It was controversial because many people said they had contaminated with drill fluid.
10:43So the international science community was skeptical of the Russian find.
10:47But the British and the American teams were still trying to poke their legs.
10:51And they were using a different drilling tech that didn't use drill fluid, but super clean hot water that was
10:57filtered and decontaminated with UV light.
10:59This boiling, pressurized water just blasts and melts away the ice.
11:03But it still needed fuel to power the thing.
11:07And the British team, they ran out.
11:10The other teams tried to help them get more fuel, but they couldn't.
11:14So now, with only one team left, they slowly went deeper and deeper and deeper until finally…
11:24I remember breaking into the lake and you could hear the cheers.
11:28The whole roar went up.
11:29It was pretty…
11:30I had goosebumps and we broke through.
11:32So they bring up a sample of liquid water from this lake.
11:36And inside, they find…
11:39Life.
11:40Tons of life!
11:42A full ecosystem with colonies of bacteria and tiny organisms that were all thriving without sunlight.
11:50And in 2018, they did it again.
11:53Here.
11:53This time sampling sediment, too.
11:55Dr. Preskew gave us a sneak peek of the research that he's about to publish from that lake.
11:59And it seems to show that some of the life under Antarctica is genuinely new and different than anywhere else
12:08on Earth.
12:10We found some new kinds of viruses that are bacterial viruses.
12:14Don't worry.
12:14These are viruses that are specific to bacteria.
12:16They're not going to infect you.
12:18I was worried about that, too.
12:19I want to study them.
12:20I just want to never get them.
12:22No, I don't think you're going to get them.
12:24I mean, I'm still alive.
12:25Do you think…
12:27Do you think that there are larger animals down there that we haven't seen yet?
12:33Yeah, that's another…
12:34That's a good question.
12:35We looked around.
12:36We took an ROB and we had cameras going.
12:38So, unless they're avoiding us, they're not.
12:42But that new microbial life is really special.
12:45Because while it's new to us…
12:47Antarctica hasn't always been fully covered with ice.
12:50So maybe the new life we find is old life.
12:53Old new life.
12:54Using this new research, we can learn about the origins of life on our planet.
12:59And even beyond it.
13:01One of the coolest things about this story is that all of this science,
13:06all of this drilling through incredibly thick ice and not contaminating it or us,
13:10and all of this technology is exactly what we would use to explore the icy moons and planets
13:17for aliases left to be discovered and new mysteries to solve.
13:24Huge entry.
13:26We're making another episode all about what really happened with the ozone layer on Antarctica
13:30and the current science happening right now.
13:33So if you want to know more, subscribe.
13:40We haven't shown you the ancient aliens and the ice wall and the government conspiracies,
13:45the pyramids underneath.
13:47There's so much here that…
13:48So like and subscribe.
13:49Like and subscribe because…
13:51The conspiracies are out there and they want you to know about them.
13:54We want…
13:54Come to us and we will tell you.
13:56I think there's one of the aliens right now.
13:58That's… that's what you're hearing.
14:00Oh no!
14:00My grandfather!
14:00It's a bit Bod, Ted, but Gary.
14:01Nicki Swift, I think let's do the worst thing first.
14:01Fair enough.
14:01And Ben, I think of Crow Sanders is too Wochen.
14:01Outside of the France here is Danielle Taylor Taylor,
14:01I think so…
14:01Yeah, there's no огромool there.
14:01I think of that this has been something deep in the area and I think is left.
14:01Yeah, there have been a huge team in the back of the world,
14:02Bye-bye.
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