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This is a real photo of what looks like an intense [music] snowstorm in Egypt, but these pictures were actually taken in Antarctica. Hold on, pyramids in Antarctica? You need to hear this.
A fact-filled tour of Antarctica covering its ice sheet, record cold, bizarre wildlife like the ice fish and colossal squid, the bleeding Blood Falls glacier, and its frozen past.
Key Takeaways
- Antarctica is an extreme desert of ice that holds most of the planet's freshwater and has enormous sea-level implications
- Its isolation from warm currents after continental drift caused its glaciation
- Antarctica hosts unusual life adapted to extreme cold and darkness
- The continent preserves a climate record spanning millions of years
What the video covers
- Opens by debunking the 'pyramids in Antarctica' image, which is a naturally ice-carved mountain rather than a lost civilization
- Antarctica is the largest desert on Earth, defined by very low precipitation rather than heat
- The continent's ice sheet, up to 4.8 km thick, holds about 90% of the world's ice and 70% of its fresh water
- Melting even half the ice could raise global sea levels up to 30 m
- Antarctica is the coldest place on Earth, with record lows near -89°C and winds up to 320 km/h
- No country owns Antarctica; it has no government, cities, or permanent residents
- The ice fish has colorless blood, and the colossal squid has blue copper-based blood and enormous eyes
- Blood Falls is salty, iron-rich ancient water that rusts on contact with air and hosts trapped microbes
- Ice cores trap air bubbles up to millions of years old, making Antarctica a natural time capsule
- The continent was once forested and warm before Pangea broke apart and ocean currents isolated it, causing it to freeze
Chapters
- 00:00Pyramids in Antarctica? Introduction
- 00:43Size, Ice Sheet, and Sea Level Risk
- 01:30Coldest Place on Earth and Extreme Winds
- 02:30Unclaimed Land and Hidden Mountains
- 03:48Blood Falls and Ancient Microbes
- 04:38Ice Cores and Ancient Air
- 05:25From Pangea to a Frozen Continent
- 06:03Meteorites and Space Rocks
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Antarctica is the biggest desert on Earth, and it's made entirely out of ice. Now, most people will picture a desert made out of sand and heat, but a desert is really just a place with almost no rain. And parts of Antarctica
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haven't seen snow or rain in almost 2 million years. Welcome to episode one of a deep dive in Antarctica. First, we got to talk about how big this place really is. Antarctica is larger than the United States and Mexico combined. And sitting
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on top of it is a sheet of ice up to 4.8 km [music] thick. Now, for reference, that's about six Burj Khalifas stacked on top of each other. And that ice is so heavy that it's actually pushing the continent
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down. Picture like a bowling ball on a mattress. That one ice sheet holds 90% of all the ice on the planet, and about 70% of the world's fresh water. Now, here's what that means. If even half of that ice melted, global sea levels would
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rise up to 30 m. So, cities like Miami, New York, Venice, [music] Shanghai, pretty much all underwater. And that's just if only half melted. Now, we're going to look more into that later in the series. Antarctica is the coldest
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place on Earth. The lowest temperature is ever recorded here was minus 89° C. Now, that is so cold that it would hurt to breathe. Satellites have actually spotted pockets of the ice that have dropped closer to minus 98. Now, just to
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help you understand how cold that is, a tray of water would take about 3 hours to freeze in your kitchen freezer. In Antarctica, that same tray would turn to solid ice in under half an hour. The wind [music] speeds can hit up to 320
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km/h. That's stronger than a Category 5 hurricane. That's strong enough to flip a truck without much effort. Now, no country owns Antarctica. Not one. It's the only continent on Earth with no government, no cities, and no permanent residents. And we are still discovering
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what's below that ice. Scientists have found entire mountain ranges buried down there. Ranges the size of the Alps that no human has ever seen with their own eyes. Now, [music] back to that pyramid I showed at the start of the video, the
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internet likes to think that that is signs of a lost civilization. It's actually a mountain that's been carved into that shape by ice over millions of years, [music] but it gets wilder.
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Inside of these mountains, scientists have found fossils of sea creatures, which means [music] this frozen wasteland was once warm, green, and full of life. There were forests here. There were even dinosaurs. So, how does a continent freeze over like this and
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never thaw again? This is real footage of an ice fish, the only creature on Earth with clear blood, and it lives [music] in Antarctica. Now, when you picture animals living in Antarctica, we often think penguins, but let's forget
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about the penguins because the real residents that live in Antarctica look like they're from a completely different [music] planet. What could possibly survive those conditions? Let's start with that ice fish. It's the only animal with a backbone that has no red blood
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cells at all. Its blood runs completely see-through, filled with a natural antifreeze that stops it from icing over in water cold enough to pretty much kill anything at all, but it is not the biggest thing living down there. Look at
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this nightmare fuel. In the freezing black water below, lives the colossal squid. It's the largest invertebrate on the planet, [music] up to half a ton.
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Its eyes are bigger than a human head. In fact, it's the largest eyes of any animal that's ever existed. It also has these rotating hooks on its arms so that it could lock onto whatever it catches, and its blood isn't red, either. It's
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blue. Instead of iron, it uses copper to carry oxygen, and that copper blood works far better in freezing low-oxygen water. We have never been able to film a fully grown one alive. That is how deep and dark its world is. Now, before we
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get to the next one, please be sure to like and follow so that more of this content pops up on your feed. Okay, moving on. Then there's possibly one of the strangest things in Antarctica of all, a glacier that appears to be
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bleeding. In one frozen valley, there's a waterfall of deep red that pours straight out of solid white ice, [music] and for hundreds of years, nobody knew why. This isn't blood. It's actually ancient salt water, and it's trapped underneath the glacier for around 2
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million years. In fact, it is so salty, it never freezes, [music] and it's so rich in iron that the moment it hits air, it rusts and turns this brownish-red color. Now, that's not just rusty water. It is very much alive.
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There's tiny microbes that are still [music] surviving inside of it. These have been sealed off from the world in total darkness with no sun and no oxygen. They've been trapped down there since before the first humans [music] ever walked the earth. Now, speaking of
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humans, nobody lives permanently in Antarctica. There's no cities, which means there's no locals. There's just scientists that rotate in and out. Well, it looks further into this, there has actually been people that have been born in Antarctica. The first was a baby boy
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in 1978. Argentina decided to fly down a pregnant mother on purpose, betting that a birth on the ice would strengthen their claim to the land. But, the next question isn't what lives on Antarctica, it's what this frozen continent has been
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hiding. Because underneath and inside all this ice is essentially recording of the past millions of years. This is a real piece of ice pulled from deep under Antarctica. And if you zoom in, you can see that there's air trapped inside
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that's older than the human race. You see, Antarctica is the world's largest time capsule. Out on the ice sheets, snow falls every year, trapping tiny pockets of air and sealing it into the ice. So, when scientists drill down and
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pull up a core, they're holding frozen atmosphere, some of which is up to 6 million years old. If you were to crack open one of these ice samples and breathe in the air that's inside of these bubbles, you would technically be
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breathing in air that is millions of years older than the first breath [music] a human ever took. Here's a wild thought, Antarctica wasn't always frozen. If you go [music] back far enough, it was covered in forest with dinosaurs walking across it. And we know
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this because their fossils are still being found in the rock there. Now, to understand how Antarctica became frozen, we got to go back to Pangea. Every continent on earth was once a single landmass, and Antarctica was in the
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middle of it. It was tucked under Africa and India with Australia locked on the one side and South America on the other.
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Then Pangea broke apart. All the other countries drifted north towards warmer parts of the planet, but Antarctica didn't get so lucky. It stayed at the bottom of the world, but still for millions of years it was still green
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there. The whole planet was warmer and warm ocean currents were still able to reach it. Then Australia and South America pulled away for good. And when that happened, it opened up a gap that let the ocean fully circle Antarctica
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completely, sealing it off from every warm current on Earth. Alone at the bottom of the world, it froze and it never came back. But some of the stuff this continent is holding didn't even come from Earth. Out on the ice, there's
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a wind-swept patch of blue [music] called the Allan Hills. This is the same place where the ancient ice cores come from and it is covered with rocks from space. You see, dark meteorites [music] will stand out instantly against endless
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white, making Antarctica the best place in the world to find space rock. In fact, in 1984, a team on snowmobiles picked up a 4-lb rock out of that ice.
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It turned out to be 4 billion years old and it wasn't from Earth. It came from Mars. It was blasted off the surface of Mars by an impact. It then drifted through space before it finally landed right there in Antarctica. And when
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scientists [music] looked inside, they found tiny shapes that looked like fossilized microbes, aka possible evidence of life on another planet. In fact, it was taken so seriously that in 1996, the president of the United States went [music] on TV and announced it to
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the world. Today, rock 84001 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions [music] of miles.
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It speaks of the possibility of life. Now, later studies argued that those shapes could have been formed without life, so [music] the case stayed unproven. Antarctica looks like a frozen wasteland, but it's essentially like a diary for Earth with millions of years
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of data frozen right there. This is a real photo of a Nazi seaplane being lowered off of a ship in Antarctica. The plan was to fly over the continent and photograph it. And they [music] took over 11,000 photos. In 1938, German
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seaplanes mapped 600,000 square kilometers of coastline. And get this, while flying over Antarctica, they dropped metal darts stamped with swastikas on them. Using those as physical markers claiming the land from the air. Now, each one of these darts
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was over a meter long. Picture the size of a golf club. Now, this is where the internet starts to take over. There are claims that there's a secret base underneath the ice, that Nazi leaders were hiding there after the war, that
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there were flying saucers driving off the US Navy in 1946. None of which happened. But, what did happen is still pretty wild. You see, back then, there [music] were no rules yet. Countries would just simply claim parts of
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Antarctica. And 5 days before this German ship made it to Antarctica, Norway had already declared that exact same piece of land that they tried to claim with the metal darts. Essentially, Germany spent a fortune trying to claim land that was already claimed. But,
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there's way more. If you guys are enjoying this content, give this video a like. And toss a follow if you want more videos like this popping up on your feed. Let's keep going here. In 1959, a group of countries got together and
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signed the Antarctic Treaty, which basically said no mining, no military, and no one's allowed to own it, just science. And it's still in effect [music] today. Now, there are some claims online saying this actually expires in 2048. It doesn't. 2048 is
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just the first year that any of those countries are allowed to ask [music] for a rule change. And to have any of those rules change, there would have to be a unanimous decision. But, the real question is, who would even want
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Antarctica? This frozen barren wasteland. The answer is everybody. Antarctica is sitting on a fortune. One part of the Ross Sea alone may hold up to 50 billion barrels of oil. There's coal, iron, copper, and the rare earths that's in every phone and battery. On
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top of all that, Antarctica is home to 70% of the world's fresh water. In the future, if clean water is ever at a shortage, clean water would become the most valuable resource on Earth. So, if it's sitting on a fortune, why doesn't a
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country just come in and take [music] it? There's nobody standing guard. What's really stopping all this? The cost. Drilling through kilometers of moving ice, [music] thousands of kilometers from anywhere, is brutally expensive. Taking Antarctica just isn't profitable yet. So, that's
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the future of Antarctica. But, what about the rest of the world? Because on the west side, there sits a glacier the size of Florida. And scientists call it the Doomsday Glacier. Picture a giant piece of ice that's sliding off the
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land, and [music] the only thing holding it back is an ice shelf that is cracking. Now, once that breaks, that glacier will enter into the water and raise sea levels by about 2 ft. Not only that, [music] it's holding back the rest
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of West Antarctica. And if that goes, too, you're talking closer to 10 ft. And if you live in a coastal city, not to freak you out, but scientists are giving this decades, not centuries. So, Antarctica may be the emptiest place
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[music] that we have here on Earth, but it's also one of the most important pieces we have, too. Now, if you guys enjoyed this series, I've got one on the [music] Amazon rainforest, and also one on North Sentinel Island, which you can
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watch right now. Thank you so much for watching, [music] and I'll catch you in the next one.
Topics:Antarcticaice sheetsea level riseice fishcolossal squidBlood Fallsice corescontinental driftPangeapolar science
