What's Hidden Under Antarctica?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Ready?

[00:00:05]When you fly over Antarctica all you see is white.

[00:00:12]You don't hear any birds.

[00:00:14]You don't see any plants.

[00:00:16]It looks empty, but there's something hiding down below this ice.

[00:00:23]In 1970, a group of Soviet scientists started drilling right here. For 28 years they kept going and going until after nearly 4000m.

[00:00:36]They suddenly stopped because they had found something unimaginable.

[00:00:41]Liquid water.

[00:00:43]A secret lake, down below all this ice that had been completely sealed off from the rest of the world for 15 million years.

[00:00:54]How?!

[00:00:55]And... is there something alive in there?

[00:00:59]Creatures that have been evolving separately from the rest of the planet for 15 million years?

[00:01:06]So scientists started searching for more of these secret lakes.

[00:01:09]And as they did, they realized there is way more going on under Antarctica than we ever thought.

[00:01:19]I needed to know the truth about Earth's most remote continent.

[00:01:24]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.

[00:01:38]Bring out the drill!

[00:01:47]Ready?

[00:01:48]If you wanted to drill to the bottom of Antarctica.

[00:01:51]The first thing you need to realize is this ice is way thicker than you think.

[00:01:56]If we were to take a chunk out of this ice and place it on the surface, at its thickest, it would be this tall.

[00:02:05]Wow.

[00:02:07]That's nearly the height of Mount Kilimanjaro.

[00:02:10]You would have to stack the tallest building in the world six times to reach the top of that!

[00:02:16]And this isn't just one uniform block.

[00:02:18]It's full of all different kinds of ice.

[00:02:21]And if you looked into the hole left behind by our chunk, you'd see land!

[00:02:28]So as we start drilling, at first we're passing through snow, which is surprisingly scarce here because Antarctica is the driest, coldest, windiest continent on Earth.

[00:02:39]It's technically a desert.

[00:02:41]I can confirm it is very cold and very windy.

[00:02:46]On average, it only snows a couple centimeters a year here, meaning the snow just a few feet under your boots could be from a decade ago, but as our drill makes its way through this snow, the texture starts to change.

[00:02:57]"The snow then, of course, keeps accumulating and the deeper layers become consolidated into firn."

[00:03:03]That's Dr. Steven Chown, a biologist who specializes in life on Antarctica.

[00:03:08]He's leading the trip I'm on with the White Desert Foundation's “Science Week.”

[00:03:11]It supports scientific research in Antarctica.

[00:03:14]The “firn” that he's talking about is the stage between snow and ice.

[00:03:18]It looks like a frozen sponge.

[00:03:20]So we're drilling through this frozen sponge.

[00:03:22]And before we reach the point where it actually turns into ice, we hit something alarming.

[00:03:33]I don't know why driving over it feels so much scarier than walking over.

[00:03:37]It really does.

[00:03:38]The reason to be scared is that as we're drilling through the firn, it's not staying still.

[00:03:43]As the snow and ice builds up its own weight, slowly pushes it over the land toward the coasts.

[00:03:49]And then, as it reaches the end of the continent, it leaves the land and extends out over the ocean.

[00:03:55]That's called the ice shelf.

[00:03:56]The problem is, as this giant ice sheet slowly flows across the rocky ground, it stretches and contracts.

[00:04:04]And if it stretches too fast, the firn snaps, creating... I'm about to go down into that crevasse.

[00:04:13]You would never know it was here.

[00:04:15]Oh my God.

[00:04:17]This is a little bit of a test of my claustrophobia.

[00:04:21]Bye!

[00:04:24]Into the darkness we go.

[00:04:26]Whoa. It's huge.

[00:04:31]This is incredible.

[00:04:36]You would never think this is down here.

[00:04:38]Look how deep this is.

[00:04:39]You would not want to fall down into one of these.

[00:04:42]I'm gonna... I'm gonna get out now.

[00:04:45]This is the amount of time that I want to spend underground.

[00:04:49]So to not fall into a crevasse and to know what's coming down below us, we need to do a lot of prep.

[00:04:55]So back in the 1950s, scientists would explode TNT on the surface to measure the seismic waves that would bounce back through the ice.

[00:05:04]Today, they shoot lasers from satellites that bounce off the surface, and any wrinkles or sagging give us hints at what's below.

[00:05:14]TNT, space lasers. Scientists are awesome.

[00:05:19]But to really get underneath in detail, they mostly shoot ice penetrating radar down from planes like this plane!

[00:05:27]They crisscross the continent, filling in a picture of what's really underneath Antarctica.

[00:05:33]And what they can now see is the outline of an ancient world.

[00:05:43]It's not flat.

[00:05:44]There's a trench deeper than the Grand Canyon, a completely hidden mountain range that rivals the European Alps.

[00:05:52]Evidence of a massive impact crater and the largest volcanic region on Earth.

[00:05:58]But in the late 60s, as they were flying these ice penetrating radar planes, they suddenly spotted something especially strange.

[00:06:06]"They also saw these weird depressions, a really big one,: like flat spots? "Yeah, sort of a tiny depression" That earlier research with the TNT had hinted that there was something odd here too.

[00:06:17]And that Soviet drilling team? They're drilling right on top of it.

[00:06:21]So let's go deeper.

[00:06:23]The deeper we go.

[00:06:24]It's like we're going back in time, layers upon layers stacked on top of each other.

[00:06:30]The pores in the spongy firn get squished and the air inside gets locked in, creating little bubbles from that time in history.

[00:06:38]So now we're passing the Renaissance, the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt, when humans started farming, there's the extinction of Neanderthals and the first modern humans.

[00:06:54]"And you can analyze that record by drilling a core all the way down through the ice."

[00:07:00]Wow. This is not easy.

[00:07:04]Is it going down?!

[00:07:06]I can't tell!

[00:07:12]Oh, awesome.

[00:07:18]"So here you can tell the story of the ice.

[00:07:20]So if you hold it up against the light, you can see some of the layers."

[00:07:23]I see it! Wow.

[00:07:27]Look at all these bubbles.

[00:07:28]Those are pieces of atmosphere from decades or centuries ago.

[00:07:32]But it's not just bubbles.

[00:07:34]It's also sort of these tree rings of different.

[00:07:37]I don't know what to call it.

[00:07:38]Shades of ice? "Exactly."

[00:07:40]But if you hold it up, you can see that there are actually lines in it.

[00:07:44]Ice that forms in winter has a different texture and composition than summer ice, creating these lines.

[00:07:50]And you can count them like tree rings, but you can also see huge sudden changes: "Where you can see certain events like a volcano eruption, for instance."

[00:07:59]Like this!

[00:08:00]That dark line is ash from a volcano eruption over 20,000 years ago.

[00:08:06]And as I was looking at these layers of exposed ice, I realized why scientists said were not allowed to do something while we're hiking on Antarctica.

[00:08:16]This is why you can't pee on the ice.

[00:08:19]Because if you did, one day some descendant of yours would be taking an ice core in Antarctica, and they'd dig and dig and dig and they'd pull it out and they'd say, “What's that yellow line?”

[00:08:32]It's a funny way to understand what's really so important about this ice.

[00:08:36]It's this incredible record of Earth and life on Earth that we can learn from.

[00:08:42]"For me, one of the most amazing, cool science things is that a team from Europe has found a core.

[00:08:51]It's 1.3 million years and pulled they it out, and they haven't yet analyzed it, but it's in the lab."

[00:08:58]Oh, that’s so exciting.

[00:08:59]When can we expect it?

[00:09:00]"I reckon in the next couple of years." Awesome.

[00:09:03]"And that'll be the longest history of the planet's climate in ice."

[00:09:11]Oh my God.

[00:09:17]As I was hiking, I said how lifeless everything looked.

[00:09:20]And then Dr. Chown told me to go find a white rock and look underneath it.

[00:09:26]It became kind of a mission as we were hiking around, and at first I really didn't understand why.

[00:09:32]Mico, I went for a hike.

[00:09:33]I'm in Antarctica right now and I was picking up white rocks.

[00:09:38]Why would under a white rock be a good place to find life, as opposed to just under any rock?

[00:09:44]"Those white rocks can let a little bit of light filter through, almost like a natural greenhouse effect for those tiny organisms underneath.

[00:09:52]It's a really neat adaptation." So this is Mico.

[00:09:55]It's like Clippy, but way smarter, actually.

[00:09:58]Wait, hold on one second.

[00:09:59]There's a secret way to turn it into.

[00:10:01]Yeah! I find that talking out loud to it sometimes helps me figure out what I'm most interested in, and then I can go deeper into the research and figure out which way I want to go with the story.

[00:10:10]I'm still on the hunt for a white rock with life underneath.

[00:10:13]Now, we're almost at the lakes at around 3500m or over two miles deep.

[00:10:19]The ice has completely changed.

[00:10:22]There are no bubbles.

[00:10:23]There's no dust.

[00:10:25]It's so clear you could read a book through it.

[00:10:27]This ice isn't coming from compressed fallen snow.

[00:10:31]It's coming...from below.

[00:10:34]After decades of drilling and radar and seismic and satellite data there was only one explanation.

[00:10:40]A lake. And not just any lake.

[00:10:43]It's huge.

[00:10:45]It's similar in size to Lake Ontario.

[00:10:49]By volume, this is the sixth largest lake in the world.

[00:10:53]It's called Lake Vostok.

[00:10:56]But wait, how could there be liquid water under all this ice?

[00:11:01]Well, for one, the ice is acting like a giant thermal blanket.

[00:11:04]Heat from Earth's core is held in place down here.

[00:11:07]But more importantly, sitting under all this ice is ~350 times more pressure than what you feel at sea level.

[00:11:15]And as pressure rises, water stays liquid at lower temperatures, which means...a massive under ice lake is possible.

[00:11:26]So now the question is, if there's water down there, could there be life?

[00:11:30]And if it was isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years, what would it look like?

[00:11:37]With a drill poised right above it They now have to decide.

[00:11:42]Should they poke it?

[00:11:43]"They realized they could potentially go all the way through into the lake water."

[00:11:48]Was that risky?

[00:11:50]"Yeah. Oh, totally.

[00:11:51]Nobody knew what would happen.

[00:11:52]Like, would it pressurize and blow everything out?

[00:11:55]Would it, you know, would it be really super dangerous?"

[00:11:59]"We actually looked at this very closely because we don't want to kill anybody."

[00:12:03]Oh, good.

[00:12:04]That's John Priscu, one of the first scientists to study Lake Vostok.

[00:12:07]"If you take a Pepsi bottle and you put in a Mentos, these little minty things, and blow it in, it just blows up.

[00:12:14]So that's what we're looking at.

[00:12:15]So Lake Vostok had a lot of water and be a blowout like a volcano.

[00:12:19]This took about ten years to sort out.

[00:12:21]It took a good portion of my life."

[00:12:23]But during this time, studies kept finding more and more lakes.

[00:12:27]Hundreds of them.

[00:12:28]And satellites revealed something very weird.

[00:12:32]The ice sheet was lifting and dropping almost ten meters in some places, and Dr. Helen Fricker was the first to notice.

[00:12:41]"Yeah, it was pretty incredible.

[00:12:42]It was one of those, like, jaw-dropping moments."

[00:12:45]While Vostok and other lakes like it sat sealed off around the continent, there were hundreds of other active lakes that can literally lift and drop parts of the ice sheet as they filled and drained into one another.

[00:12:58]And the first one that she saw was here.

[00:13:01]"The whole lake shape looks like a footprint."

[00:13:03]So there aren't just lakes down there.

[00:13:05]It's an entire plumbing system under the ice connected by rivers.

[00:13:11]So at this point, over a decade had passed since drilling had paused at Vostok and we'd learned so much.

[00:13:16]So now the plan wasn't for one country to drill into one lake.

[00:13:20]It was for three countries to drill into three lakes: the Russians into Lake Vostok, the British into Lake Ellsworth, and the Americans into Lake Whillans.

[00:13:31]Time to poke an ancient lake!

[00:13:33]First up, the Russians.

[00:13:34]They had a massive head start with their effort to drill into Lake Vostok.

[00:13:37]But they had a problem.

[00:13:39]There hole was already filled with drill fluid to prevent it from freezing, specifically kerosene.

[00:13:44]So to solve this problem, they added freon, which is heavier, and the idea was that it would act like a plug.

[00:13:49]And then they used the special drill with a heated tip to slowly melt into the surface of the lake.

[00:13:55]And as soon as they broke through, the pressurized water from the lake, shot up over 30m into the hole, pushing the kerosene and the freon away.

[00:14:03]"I saw the videos and there was kerosene blowing at the top of that hole.

[00:14:07]It was a little scary. I'd be running as fast as I could."

[00:14:09]They left that new lake water in the hole to freeze for a season, and then they pulled it up to study it, and the headlines said that they found a totally new type of bacteria! But those bacteria were suspiciously similar to the bacteria found in kerosene.

[00:14:25]"Problem was that it mixed with the drilling fluid, which is highly contaminated.

[00:14:29]It's full of bacteria.

[00:14:30]so they didn't publish anything."

[00:14:33]"That was controversial because many people said they had contaminated with drill fluid."

[00:14:38]So the international science community was skeptical of the Russian find, but the British and the American teams were still trying to poke their lakes, and they were using a different drilling tech that didn't use drill fluid, but super clean hot water that was filtered and decontaminated with UV light.

[00:14:55]This boiling, pressurized water just blasts and melts away the ice, but it still needed fuel to power the thing.

[00:15:02]And the British team, they ran out.

[00:15:05]The other teams tried to help them get more fuel, but they couldn't.

[00:15:09]So now, with only one team left, they slowly went deeper and deeper and deeper until finally... "And I remember breaking into the lake and you could hear the cheers. The whole roar went up.

[00:15:24]It was pretty... I had goosebumps and we broke through."

[00:15:27]So they bring up a sample of liquid water from this lake, and inside they find life.

[00:15:35]Tons of life! A full ecosystem with colonies of bacteria and tiny organisms that were all thriving without sunlight.

[00:15:45]And in 2018, they did it again here, this time sampling sediment too.

[00:15:50]Dr. Priscu gave us a sneak peek of the research that he's about to publish from that lake.

[00:15:54]And it seems to show that some of the life under Antarctica is genuinely new and different than anywhere else on Earth.

[00:16:04]"We found some new kinds of viruses that are bacteria viruses."

[00:16:09]Don't worry. These are viruses that are specific to bacteria.

[00:16:11]They're not going to infect you. I was worried about that too.

[00:16:14]I want to study them.

[00:16:15]I just want to never get them.

[00:16:17]"No, I don't think you’re gonna get ‘em.

[00:16:19]I mean, I'm still alive."

[00:16:21]Do you think.

[00:16:22]Do you think that there are larger animals down there that we haven't seen yet?

[00:16:28]"Yeah. That's another. That's a good question.

[00:16:30]We looked around, we took an ROV and we had cameras going, so unless they were avoiding us, there’s not."

[00:16:36]But that new microbial life is really special because while it's new to us... "So Antarctica hasn't always been fully covered with ice So maybe the new life we find is old life. Old new life."

[00:16:49]Using this new research, we can learn about the origins of life on our planet and even beyond it.

[00:16:57]One of the coolest things about this story is that all of this science, all of this drilling through incredibly thick ice and not contaminating it or us, and all of this technology is exactly what we would use to explore the icy moons and planets for alien life.

[00:17:15]Finding life here makes many scientists think that we'll find it out there.

[00:17:21]Do you think that there is life on the icy moons like Europa?

[00:17:27]"Yes. Yes, definitely."

[00:17:29]We found life in one of the coldest, darkest, most alien places on Earth.

[00:17:35]There are hundreds of other lakes still untouched.

[00:17:39]And while scientists think it's very unlikely that any of them contain larger life forms, what's inside is still a mystery.

[00:17:46]"It's just cool.

[00:17:47]Science is amazing and humans are amazing for doing this."

[00:17:50]"We have a lot more to explore."

[00:17:53]Exploring has never been easy.

[00:17:55]"The teamwork involves so many people involved.

[00:17:58]You know, it's just an incredible thing."

[00:18:01]but it's worth it.

[00:18:02]There are still untouched places left to be discovered and new mysteries to solve.

[00:18:10]HUGE*, if true.

[00:18:11]We're making another episode all about what really happened with the ozone layer on Antarctica and the current science happening right now.

[00:18:19]So if you want to know more, subscribe.

[00:18:27]"We haven’t even shown you the ancient aliens and the ice wall and the government conspiracies.

[00:18:31]The pyramids underneath.

[00:18:33]So much here though."

[00:18:34]"Like and subscribe, because the conspiracies are out there and they don't want you to know about them."

[00:18:40]We want come to us and we will tell you."

[00:18:42]"I think there's one of the aliens right now."

[00:18:44]That's that's what you're hearing. Yeah. Oh, no.