THEY’RE WALKING AGAIN: Giants Spotted in Antarctica

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Giant vase-like sponges, otherworldly jellyfish, segmented worms covered with bristles, and large octopuses are the newest Antarctica discovery. Scientists found them after a giant iceberg had broken away, and it turned out to be a treasury of ancient life under ice.

[00:00:21]In January 2025, a huge iceberg the size of Chicago called A84 broke off from Antarctica's George V 6th ice shelf, which is a large ice shelf about 280 mi long, 12 to 43 mi wide, and [music] around 820 ft thick. In the summer, which lasts from November to late February, the ice shelf melts at the surface and meltwater ribbon lakes form.

[00:00:50]They're elongated and ribbon-like.

[00:00:52]That's how they got their name. Anyway, when the [music] iceberg floated away, it left part of the ocean floor wide open, and it was a spot no one had ever seen before. Scientists on the research ship Falor 2 were nearby in the Belling Chaos Sea. As soon as they heard about the iceberg, they immediately changed their plans. They understood that it was a super rare chance to check out [music] something unknown and amazing, like lifting a rock in the forest to see what's hiding underneath.

[00:01:25]The researchers used an underwater robot named Subastion and explored [music] the deep sea for 8 days. They went as deep as over 4,200 ft. Down there, they found a hidden ecosystem. There were big corals and sponges literally packed with sea animals. a whole world under [music] the ice. The researchers thought they'd find some life down there, but they didn't expect to see so much. And this underwater ancient life wasn't just surviving. It had been thriving in that harsh, icy place for a really long time.

[00:02:01]Anemmones that looked like fluffy little trees, sea spiders, [music] ice fish, octopuses. The research was live streamed to scientists from all over the world. [music] And those live streams are actually in open access.

[00:02:15]The coolest thing was that some discovered creatures seem to be new species. Yes, there are probably new species in Antarctica in 2025.

[00:02:25]And some might only live in this region.

[00:02:28]That's because Antarctica isn't just really far away. It's been cut off from the rest of the world for millions of years.

[00:02:36]The Antarctic circumpolar current surrounds it like a big water moat surrounding a castle. But even if it turns out that those species are not new, the scientists have still found snails, worms [music] with bristles, crustaceans like tiny crabs and shrimp, and a species of the phantom jellyfish.

[00:02:54][music] Those are super rare and look otherworldly.

[00:02:59]Their official name is too complicated, [music] so let's just call them the giant phantom jelly. This jellyfish is huge. Its bell, the round umbrella part on top, can be more than [music] 3 feet wide. It has four long arms that trail behind it. Each one as long as 33 ft, about as long as a school bus.

[00:03:20]Scientists first caught one [music] way back in 1899, but it took them 60 years to realize it [music] was a totally new kind of jellyfish. The phantom jellyfish has a see-through purplish body that looks kind of ghostly.

[00:03:35]Instead of normal jellyfish tentacles, it has these ribbon-like arms that help it catch [music] food and pull it into its mouth right in the middle.

[00:03:45]Even though jellyfish don't have brains like we do, researchers watching the giant phantom jelly noticed something surprising. The other worldly creatures seemed to move its arms very carefully and with control, especially when swimming through tight spaces on the seafloor. It looked like it was being very cautious and [music] deliberate.

[00:04:05]Uh, creepy. Another sentient being jellyfish have a simple nerve net instead of a brain, which helps them sense the world around them. But the way this phantom jelly moved made scientists think it might be smarter or more coordinated than other jellyfish.

[00:04:26]Studying it can help scientists learn how animals without brains still manage to explore and survive in tricky places underwater.

[00:04:35]Another cool find was little worms called bristle worms. Scientists call them polyches, [music] but let's stick with bristle worms because it kind of sounds fun. Lots of different kinds of them live in super cold, deep parts of the ocean. [music] Bristle worms have bodies made of many segments, and they have tiny little bristles all along their sides. These bristles help them move around, feel what's near them, and even protect themselves from danger.

[00:05:05]One cool example is the Antarctic scale worm. It's a type of bristle worm that lives in really cold, deep waters and has shiny golden bristles that make it look pretty fancy. During Antarctic deep sea exploration, the team also found giant sponges shaped like [music] vases.

[00:05:23]Usually, sponges grow very slowly. So, to get that huge, they must have been growing there for a really long time, maybe even hundreds of years. Their size shows that the deep sea animals living around them didn't just move in recently. [music] Those sea creatures have been there for decades and managed to form thriving communities under the ice. So, it really was ancient [music] life hiding under all that ice. And that surprised scientists a [music] lot. In older studies, people used to drop cameras through holes in the ice or visit iceberg areas long [music] after the ice had broken off to explore hidden ecosystems.

[00:06:05]Back then, they mostly saw bare empty seafloor with just a few living things.

[00:06:10]But this time, the team arrived just weeks after the giant iceberg broke away, and they got to see what was hiding right underneath it. The first 9 miles behind the ice shelf can hide rich and busy ecosystems. The area is dark, cold, and hidden for ages, [music] and still all kinds of creatures live there.

[00:06:32]This shows that life can survive in places that seem too harsh or frozen for anything to live.

[00:06:38]On the other hand, finding all this life down there isn't super surprising. Lots of animals live in dark, [music] cold places underwater, so it makes sense that they'd be under the ice shelf, too.

[00:06:50]The ice kind of hides them and keeps them safe from anything going on above.

[00:06:55]But what's weird is how many different kinds of creatures live there, even though it used to be a really closed off space. [music] It actually looks a lot like the seabed in parts of Antarctica that don't have ice on top. How can that be?

[00:07:10]Usually, [music] tiny plants called phytolanton grow near the surface where sunlight hits. Little shrimplike animals called krill eat those plants at night.

[00:07:20]When krill get full, [music] they sink down and bring food and nutrients to the ocean floor. Even their waste helps feed the deep sea creatures. But if there's a huge ice cap above, sunlight can't [music] get through, so no plants can grow there and no krill bring food down [music] that way. Scientists thought this would mean less food and fewer animals down there, but they found a lot of life anyway. [music] Turns out food and nutrients probably sneak in under the ice carried by underwater currents, kind of like rivers flowing under the ocean. Scientists found some animals that lived a long time. [music] So, it looks like those currents, which mostly come from melting glacier water, bring enough [music] food to keep the ecosystem healthy and full of life.

[00:08:07]>> [music] >> No one really knows what's going to happen to all that deep sea life now that the iceberg has floated away.

[00:08:13][music] Those creatures have lived under the thick ice for who knows how long in superstable pitch black conditions.

[00:08:22]Obviously, they're not exactly fans of change. So, losing that icy roof might totally mess with their whole setup.

[00:08:31]One of the scientists mentioned that the ice shelf the iceberg came from has been creeping backward like 25 m over the [music] last 50 years. That's a part of a bigger pattern. Antarctica's ice is melting faster and faster which pushes sea levels up around the world. [music] That's why this Antarctica discovery matters. The team's trying to figure out not just what's happening now, [music] but how this hidden ecosystem fits into the bigger picture.

[00:09:00]If we can understand how this place is changing over decades [music] or even centuries, maybe we can predict what's coming next. And it's pretty amazing that breaking ice can tell us so much, right?

[00:09:14]A vast expanse of white snow, freezing winds, lifeless landscapes, and weird, eerie signals seemingly coming from within Earth. These radio pulses occur in Antarctica, and no one can figure out what they are and where they're coming from.

[00:09:32]You see, scientists are running an experiment called Anita, short for Antarctica impulsive transient antenna.

[00:09:39]Basically, it's a bunch of detectors strapped to giant balloons and floating way up above the South Pole. Their job is to detect extremely high energy nutrinos. How do they spot them? right at the moment when nutrinos come into contact with ice and produce an intense short burst of radio waves.

[00:10:00]Now, nutrinos are these tiny, almost massless particles that don't have an electric charge. They're everywhere. And billions of them are flying through you every second, even while you're watching this video. Nutrinos come from all over the place. From the sun, exploding stars, deep [music] space, even from under your feet. The sun pumps them out non-stop as it fuses hydrogen into helium. Stars that are going off blast out huge bursts of nutrinos during supernova explosions. When high energy cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, they make new nutrinos that rain down on us, too. and some even [music] come from radioactive stuff decaying inside Earth.

[00:10:45]The oldest nutrinos [music] have been flying through the universe since the Big Bang, but they're [music] practically invisible because they almost never react with anything. That's why [music] scientists use unbelievable experiments like Anita to try and catch even a few of them. But let's get back to that fateful day when everything changed. Normally the radio signals produced by nutrinos bounce off the ice and fly upward. That's where Anita can catch them. This is the whole point of the experiment to study nutrinos and learn more about distant cosmic events like supernovas or whatever's happening light years away. But then something really weird happened. [music] The detectors picked up radio waves that weren't bouncing off the ice at all.

[00:11:34]They looked like they were coming from [music] below the horizon, from under the ice. Now, this shouldn't even be possible. According [music] to everything we know about physics, signals can't just travel upward through solid rock and ice. One of the [music] researchers, Stephanie Wizelle from Penn State, also said that those radio [music] waves were coming in at super steep angles, like 30° below the surface. The only way that [music] could happen is if the signal had passed through thousands of miles of solid rock before hitting the detector. But if that were true, [music] the rock would have completely absorbed it. So something just didn't add up. The team ran all the numbers and still got no clear answer.

[00:12:17]But for them, it was an interesting problem since they didn't actually [music] know what those anomalies were.

[00:12:24]What they did know was that they [music] were probably not nutrinos.

[00:12:29]That's because if the team does detect a nutrino, that means it's traveled [music] an insane distance without bumping into anything, possibly all the way from the edge of the observable [music] universe.

[00:12:40]So, whatever Anita has picked up, it's not behaving like anything scientists have seen before. It might mean there's some totally new type of particle out there, or maybe something else is going on that we just don't understand yet.

[00:12:53]>> [music] >> They published the findings in physical review letters, but the mystery remains unsolved. No one really knows what's going on under that Antarctic ice. Just that something out there isn't [music] playing by the rules. Now, if scientists actually manage to detect and trace where those crazy fast particles come from, they can learn tons of stuff about the universe, way more than even the biggest, [music] most expensive telescopes allow us to see. You see, nutrinos basically zip through space almost at the speed of light, [music] barely bumping into anything. It means they can carry untouched data about events [music] that happened millions or even billions of light years away.

[00:13:34]That's why [music] Whistle and a bunch of other researchers around the world have been building these insanely sensitive detectors to catch nutrino signals. Even the tiniest ones are super important because in this field, one tiny blip [music] of data can hold a treasure chest of information.

[00:13:52]So researchers have been designing setups in both Antarctica and South America to catch these rare particles.

[00:14:00]Anita is one of those detectors, and Antarctica's the perfect spot for it.

[00:14:05]There's hardly any radio noise. There are no cities, no traffic, and no random interference.

[00:14:11]The setup is actually pretty cool. They attach a cluster of radio antennas to a giant balloon, send it a few dozen miles up into the sky, and make it float over the endless stretches of white ice. From up there, it points downward, listening for faint radio signals [music] coming from deep inside the ice. When one of those super rare nutrinos, specifically a tow nutrino, hits the ice, it creates another particle called a tow lepton.

[00:14:38]That leptton then shoots out of the ice and [music] starts breaking down, losing energy and turning into smaller bits.

[00:14:44]That decay process gives off what's called an air shower. Kind of like a spray of invisible [music] sparks flying through the air. If we could actually see those air showers [music] with our eyes, they'd look like someone waving a sparkler through the dark. Bright streaks trailing behind [music] as it moves. Studying the direction and pattern of these signals, the ones from the ice, ice showers, and the ones in the air, [music] air showers, scientists can figure out where the original particle came from. Usually, it's super precise, kind of like bouncing a ball off the ground. You can predict where it'll go.

[00:15:24]But these weird new signals don't bounce the way they're [music] supposed to. The angles are all wrong, way steeper than anything the models can explain. So, the team dug deeper. First, they looked at all the data from Anita's [music] multiple balloon flights. Then, they compared it against tons of computer simulations of cosmic rays and nutrinos and filtered out all the [music] usual background noise. They even cross-checked their results with other experiments like the ice cube detector, which is also located [music] in Antarctica and the Pierre Augur Observatory in Argentina. They wanted to see [music] if anyone else had picked up similar upward going air showers. And guess what? Things got even weirder.

[00:16:06]They found nothing. No other detectors had picked up anything that could explain what Anita had seen. That's why the researchers ended up calling the whole situation anomalous. It basically means, "Yeah, we have no idea what this is, but it sure isn't behaving like a nutrino." Whistle explained that the signals just didn't fit into the usual picture of how particles were supposed to act. Some people have floated ideas like maybe it's [music] some new kind of physics or a hint of dark matter. Dark matter is basically [music] that invisible stuff that keeps the universe from falling apart. It's everywhere.

[00:16:42][music] We just can't see it. Scientists have been trying to figure out what it actually is for [music] almost a century. And it's still one of the biggest mysteries out there. Everything we can see, like stars, [music] planets, people, dogs, makes up only about 5% of the universe. And dark matter makes up around 27%. The rest is something even stranger called dark energy.

[00:17:06]Scientists think dark matter is what gives galaxies their shape and holds everything together like cosmic glue.

[00:17:13]Without it, the universe would look totally different. It would be totally [music] amazing to find out that this theory is true. But since Ice Cube and Augur haven't caught the same thing, [music] that really limits the possibilities.

[00:17:26]Penn State has been in the nutrino detecting game for almost a decade now, building detectors and analyzing all kinds of cosmic signals. And the team is already working on their next big project, a brand new detector called Pu.

[00:17:40]It's going to be bigger, more sensitive, [music] and way better at spotting those elusive nutrino signals. For now, this remains just [music] one of those longunning cosmic mysteries that keep scientists awake at night. But the team is optimistic. When Puo goes up, it'll have better sensors, which means if there really are more of these anomalies out there, this time they'll catch them.

[00:18:03]And maybe then we'll finally figure out what's behind them.

[00:18:09]Consider Lake Enigma. What a fitting name. It's already strange enough because it's not even supposed to exist.

[00:18:17]But now we stumbled upon actual life deep beneath it. And this just might help NASA in their search for life in outer space. The lake lies deep in the icy heart of Antarctica. So it's not really a water pool like we're used to.

[00:18:33]more like a like block of ice. Or so we thought. Just recently, Italian scientists discovered a secret that had been buried for ages. An actual body of water. And in this water, life is thriving. Various microorganisms, and even some weird little hunters, which is super weird since Enigma sits in a remote and harsh corner of our planet, the northern Victoria land in Antarctica. The entire South Pole is cold, but woo. In this place, temperatures can plummet to a horrifying minus41° F. Though on average, it's around 7.

[00:19:13]Chilly. Like we said, this lake shouldn't even be there at all.

[00:19:18]Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, even though it's covered in snow because it's super dry.

[00:19:26]There are zero rains, truly little snowfall, and the sun barely evaporates anything. And even if there is some water, the insane winds make sure to dry everything out super quickly. Putting on our thinking caps, this lake should lose an unimaginable 7 million cubic feet of water every year. Yet, the water remains. Why? No one knows. Scientists say there could be something deep underground that refills it constantly.

[00:19:55]They just have no idea what that might be. Maybe deep underground rivers, melting ice, or something else entirely.

[00:20:04]But hence the name, the Enigma Lake. The block of ice we mentioned is permanent and super thick. At least 36 ft of it, and that's higher than a three-story building. So researchers decided to check out if there's anything beneath it. They used a so-called ground penetrating radar, a super smart echo detector [music] for the ground. This radar sends invisible radio waves into the Earth. When they hit something underground, like rocks, water, or anything else, they bounce back to the device. By measuring how long it takes for the signal to return and how strong they are, we can determine the distance and what exactly the radar hit. That's how animals like bats, whales, and dolphins can see underwater. And we humans stole this cool nature idea to research buried structures in hidden caves. Scientists used this device all over the enigma surface. This way, they were able to create an entire map of this under ice world beneath. The water itself wasn't surprising. It's the unique ecosystem in it that shocked them. Unfortunately, no secret monsters or extraterrestrial secrets this time, but there are microorganisms there [music] that may not exist anywhere else on Earth. Somehow, these creatures have managed to survive in complete isolation in extreme cold. It's not that we don't know these microorganisms. We've met them before, just not exactly like this.

[00:21:34]There are a couple groups hanging out down there. The first one is Bactaroid Dota. They love breaking down complex molecules, especially in your stomach and help digest tough plant fibers. They mostly hang out inside us. But in the outside world, we might occasionally find them in soils and oceans. Then actinoacteriota, genius chemists among bacteria. They decompose organic materials and help the soil get healthier. They're also famous for producing antibiotics, so we owe a lot of our medicine to them. The third one is pseudomonadota. These guys weren't a surprise. They're crazy adaptable. They can thrive pretty much [music] anywhere from soil to water to the human body. Some of them are good, helping plants grow and in nutrient cycles, but others can be opportunistic pathogens. Ooh, bad guys. But what is actually a surprise is that Lake Enigma has tons [music] of passive bacteria.

[00:22:35]They're ultra small even for microorganisms and can barely do anything themselves. [music] So, they prefer to live in symbiosis or be little parasites, relying on their hosts for nutrients and other necessities. All these little chompers might be ancient. They could be remnants of a time before the lake froze over completely, which is hundreds of thousands of years ago. It's simply weird to encounter these bacteria in the Enigma Lake, especially the little parasites. [music] Pissa bacteria usually love low oxygen environments, but this lake is very oxygenrich. Not even mentioning an almost 40 ft of ice above. So all this means that even though we know who these guys are, this specific species might be new to us. They could have evolved with some unique adaptations and abilities using the lakes's unusual chemistry.

[00:23:28]They probably rely on a super simple and delicate food web. Some of the microorganisms produce energy from light. Well, whatever light gets down there or the lakes's chemicals. The symbiosis guys most likely survive by living on or inside their neighbors.

[00:23:46]Yep. These microscopic creatures hunt each other. Nope. Things can't be peaceful even in a place like that.

[00:23:54]If we find out what their secret to survival is, we might learn more about chemistry, medicine, [music] and even extraterrestrial life. Because if life can endure such extreme conditions, then it can probably appear pretty much anywhere, including our closest neighbors, Europa [music] or Inetilus, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They definitely hide oceans beneath their frozen [music] surfaces.

[00:24:19]And now there's a very high chance there might be some life there. Antarctica must be the closest thing we have to extraterrestrial [music] exploration before we actually land on other planets. It's full of hidden [music] mysteries and surprising creatures. Even outside of Lake Enigma, the South Pole harbors life. Just take the Mcmeuro dry valleys which are often referred to as earthly Mars. These are among the most mysterious and extreme places on our planet. They're stretching across Victoria land in Antarctica. And this is one of the driest [music] places on Earth. Makes sense if you remember the name. Surprisingly, unlike other parts of the [music] South Pole, this land is almost entirely devoid of snow and ice.

[00:25:06]Just lots [music] of super cold ground.

[00:25:08]There might even be some sand dunes nestled here and there between the rugged [music] mountains. The ground is mostly covered in loose gravel, scattered with ancient rocks [music] made of granite and something interesting called nice, just spelled differently. It's the type of rock that's been through a lot literally.

[00:25:26]It's usually born when granite and sedimentary rocks have to endure insane pressure or horrifying heat for [music] a while, a process called metamorphism.

[00:25:36]These conditions are so intense that they literally rearrange the minerals into layers. That's why [music] Nice has such beautiful folated looks. It's the planet's version of baking a layered cake. It's amazing because this place is almost exactly the way it was millions of years ago. These valleys are [music] frozen in time and they give us a little glimpse into Earth's distant past. And that includes life. Once again, local winds are absolutely terrifying gusts of cold air racing downhill, and they evaporate snow faster than it can even melt. So, logically, you shouldn't find much water here, not even mentioning life. But somehow, you can still stumble across [music] frozen lakes and selen ponds in the dry valleys. And local life stretches all reason and our understanding of biology. It exists inside the rocks themselves. [music] Microorganisms are hidden in slightly moist cracks and crevices. Deep inside there's endolithic bacteria. These guys are super chill. Instead of moving around like other microorganisms, they always stay put inside their little rocky homes. How do they survive?

[00:26:51]Through photosynthesis.

[00:26:53]Just like plants, they take teeny tiny parts of light [music] that gets in crevices and acts like little solar panels, getting energy from the sun.

[00:27:02]Meanwhile, in another place beneath the Taylor Glacier, there's bacteria that literally doesn't eat anything. Not comfort, not sunlight, not even [music] oxygen. These guys rely on a diet of dusty rocks and sulfur to fuel [music] their weird metabolisms. By breaking down sulfur and iron, they get energy to sustain themselves. This way, they easily survive in deep seas at [music] subfreezing temperatures, completely cut off from sunlight, oxygen, and the world itself. [music] This place is fascinating for both its life and the lack of it. [music] In some parts of the valleys, like University Valley, yes, that's what it's called, the perafrost [music] is so harsh that no microbes were found at all. This might be one of the only places on Earth where life appears to be completely absent. A quite scary idea. Anyway, now scientists are thinking about learning more about Lake Enigma and drilling this Mars-like environment. Exactly for that reason, to see how we could get samples from Mars in the future.

[00:28:08]Antarctica, a snowy world of about -46° F, covered in ice for millions of years.

[00:28:16]But it wasn't always this way.

[00:28:18]Scientists just found something buried deep beneath the seafloor that shouldn't exist. Tiny golden droplets of amber.

[00:28:28]This means that Antarctica was once teeming with life and thick with trees.

[00:28:32]But something happened to it. Something that could reshape the way we see our own future.

[00:28:39]Antarctica has been a land of howling winds for millions of years. No tree can grow here today. But [music] scientists who studied those lands decided to drill deep beneath the Antarctic surface. They went thousands of feet below [music] the ice, pulling up ancient layers of sediment. And there, trapped in time, they found [music] tiny pieces of golden amber. Amber is basically fossilized tree resin. It's found all over the world, often with [music] perfectly preserved pieces of ancient life.

[00:29:13]Insects trapped mid-flight. Pollen frozen in time. Entire tiny [music] ecosystems can be locked inside golden droplets in every continent. But not in Antarctica. Until now.

[00:29:27]They discovered tiny specks from 0.5 to 1 mm in size. Smaller than a grain of sand, but with huge significance.

[00:29:38]This droplet had once [music] oozed from the bark of a tree about 90 million years ago. What's even wilder, amber is only produced by certain types of trees, the ones that grow in humid, temperate rainforests and [music] jungles.

[00:29:53]That's when the realization hit.

[00:29:55]Antarctica used to be a rainforest.

[00:30:01]Those tiny flexcks of amber, clearly seen only under a microscope, [music] tell us a vivid story of a living and breathing ecosystem.

[00:30:10]Around 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Antarctica could have been covered in lush, swampy forests filled with towering conifers, ferns, and ancient plants.

[00:30:24]Some of the fragments showed signs of damage. That means the trees that produced them had been injured perhaps by wildfires or parasites.

[00:30:35]Though despite that and despite the fact it spent millions of years on the seafloor, this amber was almost perfectly preserved.

[00:30:44]Solid, transparent, and free of cracks.

[00:30:47]Normally amber buried under extreme pressure and heat just crashes over time. But this piece, it survived. That means other pieces could survive as well, and we might find more of them on the ocean floor.

[00:31:01]But this wasn't the first sign that Antarctica had once been a different place entirely.

[00:31:07]It started in 2017. A team of scientists drilled deep into the seabed near Pine Island Glacier on Antarctica's [music] west coast. They pulled up sediment cores, long cylindrical samples of earth that had been buried for millions of years. And it was insane. Inside these layers, they found fossilized roots, pollen, spores, traces of an ancient forest that had once thrived here. And that's exactly what they'd been studying ever since then. In order not to damage anything, [music] they had to spend years of hard work breaking down the sediment into thousands [music] of tiny pieces and scanning them all under fluorescent microscopes.

[00:31:50]The same team also found another piece of the puzzle back in 2020. They [music] found more sedimentary samples from the ocean floor that pointed to a land of dense trees, [music] rivers, and wetlands. a world that looked more like the Pacific Northwest or New Zealand. But why was Antarctica so warm back then? Well, that's all because of the atmosphere.

[00:32:15]90 million years ago, Earth's carbon dioxide levels were terrifyingly high.

[00:32:20]It was literally one of the warmest periods in history with temperatures soaring even at the poles. Think about it. Antarctica [music] had no ice caps.

[00:32:31]Instead, it could have had buzzing insects and maybe even dinosaurs wandering through its forests.

[00:32:37]But [music] in order to learn what happened to them, the team has to find more evidence.

[00:32:43]Antarctica really is a place full [music] of mysteries. It's hard to study because it's covered in snow and ice so much that we don't even know its true shape and size.

[00:32:53]Some parts of the ice sheet are over 3 m thick, half the depth of the Mariana Trench, the deepest trench on Earth.

[00:33:02]Luckily, snow has a great quality. It can freeze things in time perfectly, layer by layer, year after year. It buries nature's past [music] like a time capsule.

[00:33:14]Luckily, snow has a great quality. It can freeze things in time perfectly.

[00:33:19]Layer by layer, year after year, it buries nature's past like a time [music] capsule.

[00:33:26]At first, fresh snow is soft and [music] shifts easily in the wind, full of air.

[00:33:31]But as more snow piles on top, it compresses, squeezing out the air pockets and hardening [music] into dense ice.

[00:33:40]This freezing pressure locks everything inside. It traps ancient [music] plants, animals, and even entire landscapes.

[00:33:48]and they literally get frozen in time because the extreme cold slows down decay. It stops bacteria growth, preventing rot and keeping things almost perfectly intact for thousands, sometimes even millions of years.

[00:34:05]That's exactly what's going on in Antarctica. Scientists have to literally scan it all the way down this snow [music] in order to find what this place looked like millions of years ago.

[00:34:16]What they found is an entire [music] lost world buried under miles of ice.

[00:34:23]It was beneath the thickest ice of East Antarctica near the Aurora and Schmidt subglacial basins. The weight of the ice has been so immense for so long that it actually protected [music] the land from erosion.

[00:34:37]Scientists call it the ghost of Antarctica's landscape, and it's nothing [music] like the smooth, flat wasteland seen from above. They found rivers [music] that once flowed freely now frozen in place. Valleys carved by water. Even three massive sharply peaked hills. But what are they?

[00:34:59]To understand that, we need to go even further back in time to the era when Antarctica was still part of a lost superc continent.

[00:35:10]Hundreds of millions of years ago, [music] the land we now call Antarctica was part of Gonduana, an enormous superc continent that included South America.

[00:35:20]Africa, [music] India, Australia, and Antarctica all fused together.

[00:35:26]But as Earth's tectonic [music] plates slowly drifted apart, Gonduana broke into pieces. Antarctica was ripped apart, its land stretched and fractured.

[00:35:37][music] The massive ice sheets that formed later covered these broken land masses, preserving them like [music] frozen fossils.

[00:35:47]As the ice shifted and melted over time, valleys formed, and ancient rivers likely carried water toward a coast that was [music] hundreds of miles away from where it is now. But that's not the only thing Antarctica [music] has hidden. If you stripped away the ice, you wouldn't see a smooth, empty [music] continent.

[00:36:06]You'd see a super dramatic landscape, towering mountains, deep [music] valleys, even fiery volcanoes.

[00:36:15]In West Antarctica, at least 138 volcanoes are buried under the ice. One of them, Mount Arabus, is still active.

[00:36:24]And inside, it has warm volcanic caves [music] where you could walk in a t-shirt.

[00:36:29]Oh, and if it wasn't weird enough, Arabus is also [music] spewing out gold.

[00:36:35]Yep. The actual tiny specks of gold from deep within the Earth. Scientists believe this happens because magma, the superheated semi molten [music] rock beneath the Earth's surface, carries liquid gold with it as it rises.

[00:36:50]Every single day, Arabus releases about 0.2 [music] lb of it. That's worth around 6,000 bucks per day. In a year, that adds [music] up to 64 lb or more than $2 million floating into the sky.

[00:37:05]Unfortunately, before we grab shovels, we got to [snorts] remember that those are just microscopic [music] particles.

[00:37:11]They're often smaller than 60 micrometers, thinner than a human hair.

[00:37:16]Not even mentioning that they're scattered around up to 620 m away from the volcano itself. Finding them is nearly impossible. [music] But that just shows that even in such a harsh place that looks just like a white desert, there are still many fascinating mysteries to discover. For example, somehow life [music] still clings there.

[00:37:40]In 2017, scientists drilled deep beneath the ice of the Ross ice shelf looking for [music] water, but they found something fantastic instead. A river hidden beneath 1,640 ft of ice running through the dark. And [music] inside it, hundreds of tiny shrimplike creatures. They swarmed around the camera, blocking the lens, welcoming the scientists.

[00:38:06]In deep [music] caves beneath the ice, DNA evidence has also shown traces of moss, algae, and possibly [music] even unknown tiny animals.

[00:38:16]So, turns out even in one of the harshest places on Earth, life finds a way. And who knows what else we'll discover in the South Pole.

[00:38:29]The whole internet is buzzing about an unusual discovery on Google Maps in Antarctica.

[00:38:35]Southeast of Japan's Showa Station, someone noticed a giant door standing out in the icy landscape. Some call it Bigfoot's vacation home or a shuttle from Star Trek. Others say it's a blownoff Boeing door that somehow ended up in the snow.

[00:38:52]Scientists have a way less exciting explanation. It looks like the so-called doorway is actually part of fast sea ice. It floats near the coast where the water is shallow and islands are scattered around. This spot could simply be an iceberg that got stuck and is slowly melting right where it is. You can see other icebergs nearby in the same area. Ice flowing around a solid underwater rock could have formed a natural pattern. The ice is pretty thin here, and because of the rocks underneath, the ice forms unique shapes.

[00:39:26]Geologists add that the mysterious find is just a rocky ridge sticking up because the ice level has dropped a bit.

[00:39:33]The top of it is the ridge and the [music] sides are two snow tails, long streaks of snow shaped by the wind.

[00:39:40]These snow tales show which direction the wind [music] usually blows in this area.

[00:39:47]The previous mysterious Google Maps find in Antarctica was a pyramid that turned out to be a mountain. You can easily find it if you scroll all the way to the Ellsworth Mountains. It's the tallest mountain range in Antarctica and it stretches for almost 250 mi. It's not the first pyramid on this continent. as explorers from the British Antarctic Expedition found another unusually shaped mountain and nicknamed it the pyramid. But this one didn't have a pyramid shape after all. So, nope, there are no pyramids in Antarctica. Sorry to ruin it for you.

[00:40:27]In 2011, scientists from Chile found a strange fossil in Antarctica that looked like a squashed football. It received the [music] nickname the thing because it looked like something from a science fiction movie. It turned [music] out it was a giant soft shell egg from around 66 million years ago. It was more than 11 in long and 7 in wide. The only bigger egg ever found was of the extinct Madagascan elephant bird, which was 1 and 1/2 times as tall as Michael Jordan.

[00:40:59]The Antarctic egg is also special because it's the first fossil egg ever found in this part of the world. So, whoever left it there must have been huge. Probably a giant sea reptile that lived long ago, like a mossaur.

[00:41:14]This is surprising because most scientists thought these creatures didn't even lay eggs. The egg is also unique because it has a thin eggshell and no pores, which is totally different from most dinosaur eggs.

[00:41:28]Scientists did a lot of work and studied [music] 259 types of living reptiles like lizards and snakes and their eggs. From this, they figured out that the creature who laid the egg was probably at least 23 ft long, not counting her tail.

[00:41:43]During the late Cretaceous period, this part of Antarctica [music] must have served as their nursery. Paleontologists have found bones of tiny mosasaurs and plesiosaurs in the same area, as well as bones from the grown-up ones.

[00:41:59]If you've ever lost your ID and still can't find it, try looking under the Antarctic ice. Well, at least it worked for a man who was reunited with his security access card after 21 years.

[00:42:12]Rod Bud, a technician studying sea life on the Antarctic seafloor, spotted the card while he was diving at a place called Cape Evans. Rod thought it might be a credit card, so he put it in his pocket and kept working. When he took a closer look, he realized it actually belonged to someone named David Macau.

[00:42:31]The card stayed with the research institute where Rod worked for eight more years until they finally managed to find David. It turned out that he had never been to Antarctica. In 2003, someone broke into his car in Wellington, New Zealand, and they tossed the contents of his briefcase into the harbor. So, the card traveled over 2,400 m in 13 years. There aren't even ocean currents that move directly from Wellington to Cape Evans. If the card went through different ocean currents, the [music] journey would take around 1,000 years. So maybe it got attached to something else that could float more easily, like a piece of debris or [music] a plant that can grow on objects and make them buoyant. Or maybe the person who took David's briefcase was on a ship that went to Antarctica. Or the card somehow stuck to the bottom of a research boat that [music] ended up there.

[00:43:26]In case you want to see probably the coolest find from Antarctica, you got to head to the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, Japan. They'll [music] display a meteorite the size of a rugby ball that came all the way from Mars.

[00:43:40]A Japanese research team found it in Antarctica in the year 2000. They believe a massive asteroid impact blasted the meteorite off its home planet before it traveled through space and landed on Earth.

[00:43:52]It's one of the largest Mars meteorites [music] ever found, weighing 28 lb.

[00:43:58]Scientists studied the gas inside the [music] rock to confirm it's from Mars, and they also found special minerals inside that form when water is present.

[00:44:07]This means Mars likely had water a long time ago. So, studying the rock may help us learn more about whether life could [music] have existed on a red planet.

[00:44:20]A team of sound experts found a huge underwater canyon in Antarctica thanks to bad weather. They had to pause their work at the Casey Research Station.

[00:44:29]Instead of waiting around, they decided to use the unexpected free time to map the seafloor near Adam's Glacier. And that's how they found a canyon that is almost 7,000 ft deep, almost 30,000 ft wide, and stretches over 28 m away from the glacier. The icebreaker they were on uses a special tool called a multi-beam echo sounder. It sends out sound waves in a fan shape under the ship, then listens for the echoes to create a detailed map of the ocean floor. During the mapping, they discovered just part of the canyon before they had to return to the research station. But when bad weather returned, the ship went back and mapped even more of it. They were working among waves up to 13 ft high and winds up to 50 knots, but they still managed to get about 15 hours of data to complete their map. On their way back to Australia, they [music] stopped one last time to fill in any missing spots on the map. This advanced mapping technology is helping scientists learn more about the history of glaciers and [music] ocean interactions in Antarctica.

[00:45:38]A scientist was browsing through satellite images for brown trails of penguin droppings and found four new colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica.

[00:45:48]This means there are now 66 breeding colonies for this vulnerable species.

[00:45:54]These new colonies likely have been around for years, though they're mostly small with fewer than a thousand pairs of breeding penguins each.

[00:46:02]Some of these colonies are close to other penguin areas, like the one that's not far from an old research station that never reported penguins nearby.

[00:46:11]One of the new colonies was found close to a place called the Lazar Ice Shelf, where there used to be a larger penguin colony. They thought this colony went extinct in 2019, but it seems the penguins have just moved a bit because of changing sea ice conditions. If we add the newly found penguins to the total population of this breed, it doesn't change the picture a lot, but it can help scientists see how emperor penguins adapt to the changing conditions.