This Is Why You Can’t Go To Antarctica

Imagine the year 1840 and you are a Bonnie ship captain in the distant South Pacific when you encounter an incomprehensibly large wall of ice, it is a mile high and stretches as far as the eye can see in every direction, so you sail toward it. right to see if you can find a way around it and you sail and sail and sail and no matter how far you go it never ends and in fact you end up right where you started it's a literally impenetrable wall of ice that you will never be able to cross obviously

this

is where it ends the world and obviously

this

ice wall was built to keep us from falling off the edge of the Earth and obviously the world is flat except that no Captain Bonnie SE worth his salt would have known that the Earth was round in In 1840 he would have known that it was traveling in circles.

No one thought Antarctica was the end of the world, but in terms of accessibility it may well have been. Antarctica is a deadly, harsh and punishing place, almost impossible to survive, so even though the world did not end in Antarctica it is as if a new world began there is a reason why NASA trains astronauts in the future. missions to Mars in Antarctica is basically another planet down there people have only settled in Antarctica in the last 100 years it is still very unexplored Lands in the old days, unexplored lands were rife with legends, myths and speculation, um, dragons Darby and all that, and Antarctica is no different today.

I started researching and found a mountain of wild stories and mysteries surrounding Antarctica, so in this video let's take a look at the most mysterious place on planet Earth and get to the bottom of what's going on down there. If there is one word to describe Antarctica, it is desolate, an endless landscape of white snow and ice, at the same time one of the driest places on Earth and home to 60% of the Earth's fresh water is locked in a ice sheet that covers 99.6% of the continent. A continent that is much larger than you might think. In most map projections only a small portion of the land mass is visible in the background. map or divided in some way, but it is more than twice the size of Australia and large enough to cover the United States, Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico and most of the southern provinces of Canada and all under one layer of ice that has an average of 2,160 M. thickness is 1.3 M High average is also the windiest place on Earth with an average wind speed of 10 knots but can reach up to 80 knots or 96 miles per hour due to something called katabatic winds which are basically caused by cold, dense air that is channeled through valleys into the landscape, it is also extremely isolated, surrounded by some of the largest oceans in the world, with the continent more thousand miles away from the nearest inhabited continent, the closest point being the Antarctic Peninsula which extends 600 miles from Tira Del Fuo and Argentina and, of course, between them is the Drake Passage, which is considered one of the areas roughest ocean lakes in the world because, of course, it is also old and there are about 400 underground lakes in Antarctica or under the ice.

I guess scientists started finding these lakes in the 1970s using radar and satellite seismic technologies and some of them are more than 3 km deep in the ice and then in the 1990s Russian scientists discovered a lake which they called Lake VTO, this is the sixth largest lake by volume. in the world and for some reason it is not ice, why is it not ice? everything around him is ice. Turns out there's a geothermal vent down there that's warming it up enough to keep it liquid, but again, this is the sixth largest lake on the planet. and is under almost a mile of ice. 15 million ancient geothermal ice vents are, of course, associated with life in most places where they are found, but this particular place has been completely isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years.

Debating what kind of sea creatures could live at the bottom of Lake Bostock for two decades, scientists got their answer in 1999, but more on that later. There is something about us humans that see a place like that, so remote, that isolated that mortal. and we say yes, I'm totally going there, so in the early 20th century it was also the site of a series of tragedies when explorers rose to be the first to reach the South Pole and perhaps no explorer exemplified the arrogance of many people. -called heroic age that Robert Falcon Scott Robert Falcon Scott, in addition to having an amazing name, began his career as a respected officer in the British Navy, but in the 1890s, both his father and younger brother died unexpectedly, which It made him the sole provider for his mother and sister, so he was desperate to raise his status, but there simply weren't many opportunities for advancement in the Navy at the time and then, in 1899, while home on leave, had a chance meeting with the president of the Royal Geographic Society, a guy called Clemens Markham and he was funding an expedition to the South Pole and needed a commander, so yeah, Robert Falcon Scott jumped at the chance, so in 1901 he set sail on his ship Discovery with fellow explorers Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson and failed to arrive.

The survey, although they got to 82 latitude, which is the furthest south anyone had been at that time, but yeah, they eventually had to turn back with only 530 miles to go, this was actually kind of a disaster, they ran out supplies, all crew. they contracted scurvy, they had to resort to eating their sled dogs to survive and yet Robert Falcon Scott wanted to move on, it was actually Shackleton who insisted they return to save the crew. This actually led to a big fight between The two that lasted for years yet Robert FAL and Scott returned to Britain as heroes.

They covered new ground and made new geographical discoveries. There was a scientific component to this trip, so a lot of interesting science was done and for the British public. that he had been a little demoralized at this point in the story, um, yeah, it was kind of proof that Brit still had some fight and courage. King Edward invited him to Castle Moral Balm and in fact promoted him to Commander of the Victorian Royal Order um, he became a toast of society for a time and eventually met and married a wealthy socialite named Kathleen Bruce, so in a way he got exactly what he wanted out of that trip, but deep down it always bothered him that he never got to the South Pole, you know, and he and he blames Shackleton for keeping him and publicly he was very nice to Shackleton because He got along well and all that, but in practice he was quite antagonistic as in 1907 Shackleton launched his own expedition to the South Pole and Robert Falcon Scott forbade him from landing in McMurdo Strait, which is the same place where Discovery landed when they were the last time and at that time it was by far the safest landing site, but Scott insisted that this was his field of work and he had a right to the area, so yes, he was willing to put the entire Shackleton crew in greater danger because of that cool guy.

Shackleton landed there anyway on his ship which was called the Nimrod and they got much closer this time. They reached 88 degrees latitude, it was only 95 miles from the south pole, but supplies again ran out. The dogs were eaten and Shackleton made the decision to return to save the crew from him, which he accomplished. They all managed to return barely along the way. This would happen again to Shackleton several years later, on the Endurance, you may have heard the story of the Endurance, the ship was basically destroyed in the sea ice and he and his crew were stranded there for about 4 months before they could be rescued, but they did it.

They all survived, so while Shackleton never reached the South Pole, he gained the reputation of a captain who, as you know, always put his crew first, even if it meant going for personal glory, something that was not known. can say about Robert Falcon Scott in November 1911. The Teranova ship landed on Ross Island and from there Robert Falcon Scott set out with a crew towards the South Pole, which this time he was going to reach no matter what he was going to do once and for all. beat Shackleton and was to be the first human to reach the South Pole, the crew faced all the usual hardships, including sled dog stew, but they pressed on and on January 17, 1912, they made it.

Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole and what he found there was a Norwegian flag, yes, Ral Emon. He got there just a month before him and he had no idea, at least not until he saw Ed's flag there, so yeah, he and his crew turned around and headed back to their ship, which they never made it to. One by one, they succumbed. the cold and hunger eventually included the captain himself and thus ended Robert Falcon Scott's career because of the way Ral Amonson made getting to the South Pole look easy as if one guy had just crushed him while everyone else had struggled, suffered and often dead, he had actually trained. with his crew extensively for years before and yes, everything went very well, they returned to the ship 10 days early, although it has to be said that his entire mission was strictly competitive, as if he was only there to get to the South Pole. no scientific component, while Scott's Mission did have a scientific component;

In fact, when the rescuers found their final resting place, they had on them the first fossils ever found in Antarctica and this turned out to be one of the first great mysteries of Antarctica because these fossils were petrified wood, which means that Antarctica It used to be covered in forests, which of course would become part of the first early evidence for the theory of plate tectonics, basically proving that Antarctica used to be part of Pangia and in a much more temperate region, but After Emon, Scott and Shackleton technology improved and more and more explorers and scientists made many more discoveries in Antarctica and with it many more mysteries, so I talked about Lake Bostock and how deep it was under the ice.

Well, there is another mysterious one. Lake that is even deeper and they called it wait, deep lake, it is an inland lake in East Antarctica, it is about 55 meters below sea level and as you go deeper the salinity increases dramatically, it has about the same content of salt than the Dead Sea in In fact, it is 10 times saltier than the ocean, but due to that salinity the water never freezes even though it reaches -20°, so you might think that nothing could live in it. water so cold, but no, something lives there, a study showed in 2008. that there are actually three species of a bacteria called Hyo archa that makes up most of the biosphere there Halo ARA if you're not familiar with it it's an organism single cell that basically thrives in salt water there is also a green algae that grows on the surface of the lake which is actually the main food source for the bacteria that live there and like I said there are three different species of Halo ARA and they are all adapted to different parts of the lake, as some like deeper places, others like to eat the protein in the water and some like to eat the sugar produced by the green algae.

Speaking of algae. I mentioned before that 99% of Antarctica is covered by an ice sheet. Well, one of the few places that is not covered by a sheet of ice is the McMurdo Dry Valley and it looks like Mars there, but an interesting sight is the Taylor Glacier, which has a five-story waterfall that flows into the lake Bonnie. The interesting thing about this particular waterfall is that it looks a lot like blood, yes it looks like someone just stabbed the GLA and it's bleeding so they called it Blood Falls and yes it's only recently that scientists have been able to figure out what makes it. looks like that color.

Yes, Dr. Ken Livy is a scientist at John Hopkins University and he used transmission electron microscopes to basically examine samples from the Blood Falls Waters and what he discovered were small iron-rich nanospheres that oxidize, turning the water red and Nanospheres apparently occur in nature. I think of nanospheres as something molecular with graphite or something, but they are real things that happen in nature, they are about 100 the size of an average human red blood cell and they have their own unique chemical and physical characteristics and these nanospheres come from a lake which is about 400m underground, it's very salty and isolated from the air so it just sits there, but it's very rich in iron so once it seeps through the cracks and hits the air , iron rich water oxidizes creating Blood Falls, yes I have to do it this Sunday at the pipy Civic Center toac and stellarator. with blood drop get free tattoos The largest ice shelf in Antarctica is the Ross Ice Shelf, named after Dr.

James Clark Ross, who discovered it in 1841 andWhen I say large I mean it is about the size of France, covers over 500,000 square kilometers and is also several hundred meters thick. That's all very interesting, what really makes it interesting is that it seems that no, it's not Apex Twin's newest single, uh, it's an actual ice shelf that vibrates and is caused by the winds blowing over the dunes of snow that create vibrations on the surface. those vibrations create seismic tones, the thing is we can't actually hear those vibrations, they are seismic tones, so scientists have to use seismic sensors to hear the songs.

What you're hearing has been magnified enough so that we can hear it and it was discovered by accident, they were actually installing these seismic sensors to try to observe other things and they kept hearing these sounds and they didn't know where they were coming from and also the songs change depending on the sounds. environmental changes such as snow melting or moving in the late 1950s something really strange was discovered on the land north of Wilks in East Anartica. It's a gravity anomaly, which is exactly what it sounds like, where there is a difference between the predicted value of gravity at a specific site and what is actually observed there, so yes, there is a place in Antarctica where gravity works differently. differently, you know, that could cause gravity to work differently in a certain place, well, in this case it looks like it was a giant impact crater, yeah.

Studies have shown that there is an impact crater beneath the ice sheet that is 450 km wide, which would make it twice as large as the Chicalo crater in Mexico, the one that wiped out all the dinosaurs. NASA is actually the one who found this gravity anomaly as part of their gravity research mission and climate experiment in 2006, there are still studies to be done here, it is not completely confirmed yet, but if it was an asteroid impact, they believe which actually could have been strong enough to split the land of Gondwana as the supercontinent separating Australia and Antarctica in 2017 a giant hole opened in Antarctica how big is this hole it is the size of Ireland it is a hole of the size of Ireland a hole is 78,000 square kilometers it is actually the largest hole found in Antarctica since the 1970s implying that there were larger holes found in the 70s it is a structure called Pia which is basically an area of open water and sea ice is located in the Wetel Sea in the Southern Ocean and was formed basically because the warmer water and deeper parts of the sea push the The water heats up causing the ice on the surface to melt and then, When the water makes contact with the cooler surface water, it sinks again and then reheats and pushes towards the surface and this continues over and over again.

There are a lot of these guys now. There are a lot of holes, these holes that have appeared in the sea ice around Antarctica, but this one is huge and they're still not exactly sure how one that big could form with the methods they know anyway, so it's a bit From a mystery in 1964, the British Royal Navy HMS Protector visited Boet Island, which is located here between the Cape of Good Hope and Antarctica, and while there they found a lagoon and a waterlogged lifeboat, this ship had no candles. Any brand is just a nameless ship in a lagoon in a remote part of the world.

They also found a couple of minerals and a 44g barrel, but found no signs of life or human remains. It seemed to have been like that. Abandoned lifeboat and no one knows who abandoned it or where they went, what is even more strange in 1966, another expedition went to the same place and this time the lifeboat disappeared, there was no mention of it, as if it had simply disappeared, there is ghost ships, are there ghosts? lifeboats because this could be a ghost lifeboat and now that I've talked about ghost ships it's time to pivot a bit, everything I've talked about so far is kind of like weird things happening in a weird part of the world There are some really crazy things around Antarctica, so let's get into that.

About 10 years ago, a story began to circulate about Lake Vosto, which I was talking about earlier, and the life that could be lived there according to this story, a Russian drilling. The team was working at Lake Bosck in 2012 when they apparently encountered a monstrous octopus they named organism 46b. This monstrous octopus apparently had all the kinds of qualities you'd expect from an octopus. Apparently he was very intelligent. He was actually able to disable the workers. Over the radio, it paralyzed the prey by releasing Venom into the water and was able to shapeshift into other forms that octopuses are famous for and as the story goes, the researchers were able to capture the octopus, but the Russian authority showed up, took it away. and he denied it. once existed and nothing was ever found there and because of that organism 46b remains a mystery and some even believe that Putin plans to breed the octopus as some kind of military weapon thanks to Antarctica, speaking of monster, some people believe that the Nazis They built a secret. base in Antarctica where Hitler was taken at the end of WWII, there has been no shortage of stories of Hitler surviving that happened since WWII, this is just the Antarctic version and people who believe in the story also believe that from From this base, they were able to defeat the American and British military by shooting down their planes with the use of UFOs.

The United States eventually destroyed this base in the 1950s with nuclear weapons, but you wouldn't know it because several governments around the world, of course, have done so. I know he hid all this knowledge and if a Nazi base using UFOs for war wasn't enough to blow your mind guess what we ended up exactly where we all expected to be aliens because you know Nazis fly UFOs that's crazy they actually are aliens and I mean, I guess it makes a little bit of sense if there are aliens living here on planet Earth. Why not go to the most desolate and isolated place in the world to establish some sort of base and launch all your UF Os from and?

Of course, there is no shortage of photographs that have strange anomalies that cannot be explained, that look like UFOs and, last but not least, there are stories about pyramids or ancient civilizations that have been buried under the ice of Antarctica. Some people think this could have been like an ancient Egyptian civilization with the pyramids and stuff that some people think it could have been Atlantis. I mean, after all, we know that Antarctica used to be a more tropical continent that was in a place more suitable for life. and civilizations flourish, I mean, if you're going to bury an ancient city or civilization underwater, why not bury it under ice?

So what are we to make of all these crazy stories coming out of Antarctica? You know, mysterious lifeboats, monsters, octopuses, aliens. Nazis, well here comes the wet blanket so we can get started on that mysterious life V, so in the early 2010s, online researchers figured out what it was and it turns out it was a Soviet Antarctic whaling fleet that visited Boet Island in November 1958. They were on the ground, but bad weather hit and people were temporarily stranded, so there's not much story behind it. A helicopter picked them up a few days later, they weren't stranded for long, but they left the lifeboat behind. the lagoon um why it disappeared later it probably just sank further into the water the monster octopus in lake VTO has a pretty simple explanation turns out um yeah it's completely a work of fiction it can be traced back to a specific blog post by a a guy named C Michael Fory who was a writer for Yes the Weekly World News.

Do you remember when you went to the supermarket and saw the weekly world news and you knew it was fiction and not real. It was like something fake. We seem to have lost a bit of that lately. Yeah, I guess Weekly World News doesn't exist anymore, but he posted this on his personal blog and I guess it was clearly labeled as fiction. This is kind of like the Sergey P Moreno video I made, it was a story that took on a life of its own and it turns out that everything was made up, but it's easy to believe because yes, there are colossal squids in the world.

Southern Ocean, but because it is a subglacial lake, it lacks sunlight, it has those extremely cold temperatures, it is unlikely that a complex creature of that size could survive in it, especially something as large and complex as an octopus, with respect to all those pyramids that people say they have. found in Antarctica, it turns out that there are many mountains in the world that look like pyramids, especially when taken from above with sunlight hitting it at a certain angle and in Antarctica especially there are many mountain tops. from looking over the glacial ice that looks the size of a pyramid but is actually an entire mountain, you just don't see most of the mountain.

By the way, this is called NCH, which is a mountain or hill. Surrounded by glacial lice, in fact, is an entire mountain range in Antarctica called the Ellsworth Range. It was discovered in 1935 and yes, it has many of these pyramidal shapes. This particular one is 1265 m high from the base. mountain to the top, but all we really see is the top of that mountain sticking out of the ice, so yeah, they look like pyramids to a lot of people when it comes to Atlanta history. Isis covered Antarctica for 15 million years, which is much longer. that humans have walked the Earth, so if we could somehow establish an ancient civilization at the South Pole, it would only have happened after everything was completely frozen, which seems impossible considering the temperatures and the fact that they simply There isn't a huge amount of food there to keep you warm and nourished, so yes, stories about Atlantis are often vague and lack solid data, for example, when Asians and Europeans talked about uncharted places in the past, they could have been talking about Australia or Oceania, so now we get to the Nazi conspiracy theories and here's the deal about that, um, there's a little bit of truth in that.

The Nazis actually landed and camped in Antarctica, but it wasn't for a military base, it was for a whaling station, so Germany wouldn't do it. I have to rely on whale oil because in Norway the Germans landed in an area that had already been claimed by Norway called drawing mod land, but you know they planted flags there and called it nwab land. I'm sure I pronounced it perfectly, yes, the area. It was abandoned by the Nazis in 1945, which makes sense because the Nazis were out of power at the time, but yes, thousands of scientists have visited that area since the 1950s, it's been mapped by satellite planes, there's nothing there and it is also true that the US and Britain carried out military and bombing operations around Antarctica, but those were test missions, they had nothing to do with the Nazis long after World War II, it seems having been merged with the Nazi base to create stories about secret missions and UFOs, it all just comes out. together in a nice conspiracy stew and speaking of the UFO sightings I was talking about, most of the crashed UFOs I was talking about can easily be explained as rocks or mountain peaks or overturned icebergs, the fact is that the Antarctica is a very strange alien landscape where things don't seem normal because they aren't and it's very easy to apply wild and crazy things to things that you see that don't make sense to you, by the way, one more thing I did.

I didn't even talk about this before, but the Earth is not hollow and Antarctica is not a gateway to the planet. The hollow Earth theory actually dates back to Edmund, hello, the same guy behind Haley's Comet who came up with the idea in the 17th century, but this theory has been disproven since the 1730s and modern science. has proven that the Earth is actually made up of rock and iron, okay, trust the shirt people now, what makes Antarctica really cool is all the scientific research and experiments that are going on. done there, including life in Lake VTO, no, it's not a monster octopus, but yes, they have found evidence of life down there, so in 1998 a joint team of scientists drilled through an ice patch to Lake Bostock in search for life and by the way, if you're thinking, oh God, did they contaminate a potential ecosystem that has remained pristine for 15 million years?

Well, you're ahead of me. The team consisted of scientists from Russia, France and the United States, and the ice core they drilled was one of the deepest ice cores ever drilled descending to 3,623 m or 11,886 feet, or more than 2 thousand. Fortunately, they stopped about 100 m above the water level, but even in that ice they found Extremophilic microbes, so there is definitely life there.below. In 2012, a Russian team got a little bolder and were able to harvest water from the lake. I know it sounds like they just dipped a ladle in there and took a sip, but they were actually very careful, so this is how they did it: they dug deep until they liked it. just above the water barrier and then slowly, little by little, they pushed forward until the pressure from below forced the water to rise into the well and then they took out the drill as soon as the water went up there, the water froze, which which they covered the hole and then drilled that plug and collected a sample of that ice that was made with water from the lake.

This method has been used several times since then and there are samples that have been studied and the consensus seems to be that there is a diverse and abundant ecosystem down there, DNA sequencing found over 3500 unique genetic sequences, 94% of which were bacteria and 4% were more advanced carrots from the UK. These species were mainly described as what one would expect to find in brackish waters around deep marine sediments. and thermal vents, but while the vast majority of life found were single-celled organisms, there were some multicellular ones there - nothing much more complex than that, except that a team in 2020 found DNA that was 97% similar to a type of rock CA that lives off the coast of Antarctica called Noemia Corps now most don't believe there are actual species of cod living there, it is expected to be pollution of some kind because there has been some pollution, yes the VTO lake has been a flashpoint. among environmentalists because water samples have shown traces of kerosene and antifreeze.

Yes, one of the problems they encountered when they were drilling this 2m long well again is that sections of this well would freeze, so the Russians started using kerosene. and freon to keep the holes open and lubricated and not only did they use a little, they used 60 tons of that stuff now it wasn't like they were just pouring it into the lake there were just amounts of traits that have been found in but stillAnyway , there's a whole debate about it, but that's just one thing that's been studied in Antarctica. We study things like the ozone hole, millions of ancient DNA neutrinos from matter, space, and evidence of fires during the time of the dinosaurs.

Oh, remember the meteorite from Mars that you thought might have fossilized bacteria, yes, that's what was found in Antarctica. They also used Antarctica to study Team D Dynamics for future missions to other planets, which is all really cool, but this video is already going on too long, so I'm going. to add an extra section to the version I upload to nebula because I can do whatever I want there, yeah in my last video I used a clip from Jetson's intro and a copyright troll tried to remove my video, that's like a I have a thousand different things I have to think about when I post things on YouTube and look, I love YouTube, but I have to be honest.

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Google thinks you might like it. Look at them. I invite you to subscribe if you enjoy it. I'm back with videos every other Monday right now, usually every Monday, anyway, that's all for now. Thank you all very much for watching, please share in the comments what you are doing. Favorite fact about Antarctica is if there's anything I missed or anything like that and other than that, have a good rest of your week, stay safe and we'll see you next Monday, love you, take care.