Although it’s one of Earth’s smallest continents, its mysteries have attracted humans for centuries.
Today, no humans live permanently on Antarctica, nor have they ever,
and there’s still much to learn about this expanse of ice. But could Antarctica be hiding things
we can’t even begin to imagine? This is Unveiled, and today we’re
answering the extraordinary question: what’s really under the ice in Antarctica?
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Antarctica is already one of Earth’s weirdest places. For a start,
it’s technically the planet’s largest desert, despite being made of water. That’s because
a desert is defined by how much or how little rainfall it gets, but it doesn’t make this fact
any less odd! We also didn’t officially discover Antarctica until 1820. In fact,
it’s the only part of the world that truly was “discovered” in thousands of years,
since there were no people living there when the First Russian Antarctic Expedition
sighted an ice shelf. Its existence was theorized for centuries however, and it can be seen on many
Renaissance-era maps as the fictional continent “Terra Australis”. The idea was that since the
Arctic Circle existed, an opposite of the Arctic Circle should also exist. It wasn’t until the very
end of the 19th century that anybody actually set foot on the Antarctic landmass, however.
But exploring Antarctica has continued to be difficult,
even today. Some of the most famous people to try have also died there. In the early 1910s,
Captain Robert Scott led Britain’s Nova expedition to the South Pole,
hoping to be the first. While they reached it, they discovered that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian
expedition had beaten them by five weeks. On the return journey, Scott’s entire party perished in
the tundra. The body of one of the crew’s most famous members, Captain Oates, was never found.
But the Terra Nova expedition’s purpose wasn’t only to achieve the superhuman feat of reaching
the South Pole. Many scientists also went to Antarctica on the ship and weren’t part of Scott’s
expeditionary party. They brought back a wealth of research. Today, over a century after Terra Nova,
Antarctica remains a place of limitless scientific discovery. Many of the people who work there in
one or two-year stints are scientists conducting research. The Antarctic Treaty signed in 1959
reserved Antarctica for scientific study. And it’s not just planet Earth that Antarctic
researchers are interested in, we’re using it to answer many questions about outer space, too.
Antarctica is home to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which has detected dozens of
neutrinos that probably originated from outside the Solar System. IceCube has thousands of sensors
embedded in the Antarctic ice, all looking for neutrinos. Neutrinos are also known as
“ghost particles” because, thanks to their neutral charge, they almost never interact
with physical matter. That’s what makes them so hard to detect. Some of the neutrinos we have
detected have behaved unusually, seemingly originating from inside the Antarctic ice.
This was widely reported in 2020 as evidence of a parallel universe, but what it actually implies
isn’t that there’s an extradimensional portal down there, but that Antarctic ice has such
strange properties it can affect these neutrinos in ways we don’t fully understand. It’s not just
neutrinos that IceCube is looking for, either. The observatory has also provided invaluable research
into high energy cosmic rays and one of the universe’s most elusive substances, dark matter.
Ice is useful in discovering neutrinos thanks to something called Cherenkov radiation.
While nothing can surpass the speed of light in a vacuum,
light does slow down while passing through other objects. In particular, water and ice slow photons
significantly. The speed of light through a vacuum is about 186,000 miles per second,
but through water it’s roughly 140,000 miles per second. When a charged particle travels
through a medium like water faster than light does, it produces Cherenkov radiation, a blue
glow. Think of it like a sonic boom, which occurs when an object breaks the speed of sound, but in
this case it’s a particle breaking the relative speed of light. How do neutrinos come into it?
Well, neutrinos interact with molecules of water in ice to create such fast-traveling particles.
Having said that, this still doesn’t explain the strange angles IceCube’s neutrinos have often
appeared from. IceCube also has the potential to indirectly detect dark matter. Dark matter by its
very nature is impossible to detect directly as it doesn’t interact with normal matter,
but IceCube can try and detect the decay of dark matter as it interacts with the sun. This decay
produces, once again, neutrinos, the thing IceCube is designed to look for. So, Antarctica
holds many cosmic answers in its ice sheets. Something else Antarctica has in common with
the wider universe are its subsurface lakes and oceans. Despite Antarctica’s cold temperatures,
large bodies of water do exist inside the ice sheet itself. This happens because of the pressure
deep down. Due to the weight of the ice, the water down there isn’t actually able to freeze as it’s
being so compressed. The largest that we know of is Lake Vostok, Earth’s sixth-largest lake,
and it’s completely hidden beneath the ice sheet. Aside from this huge lake, there are
over a hundred more, all draining into the sea. All kinds of things could be happening inside the
ice sheet with these under-ice water systems. The reason this is so intriguing is that it’s a window
into the world of interplanetary subsurface oceans. Europa, Enceladus, and even Titan are
all alien moons inside our system that famously have subsurface oceans. These oceans could be home
to alien ecosystems, and studying Antarctica’s lakes will prepare us for exploring them one day.
Remarkably, we didn’t even know Antarctica had this secret water until the 2000s,
when it was discovered accidentally by scientists studying the ice sheet’s ever-changing topography.
The ice sheet also holds the long-lost remains of an ancient supercontinent,
giving us a window into hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s geological history.
Perhaps most amazingly of all, scientists have found evidence of life deep inside the ice sheet
that shouldn’t be able to exist. It’s true that Antarctica has lots of unique wildlife,
famously including its many species of penguin, but penguins don’t live 3,000 feet below the
surface of the ice. Scientists drilled down to take images of the conditions in the Antarctic
underworld and found strange, sponge-like organisms. Much like with the subsurface lakes,
scientists weren’t expecting to make this discovery, they were trying to take readings
from the seabed and just stumbled across these creatures. There are sponges and creatures on
stalks that look almost like mushrooms, and they’ve been living there in sub-zero
temperatures and total darkness for an untold amount of time. This is really extraordinary,
and if you ever wanted evidence that life can form in the icy wilds of Europa and Titan,
this is it. If it can happen down here in one of planet Earth’s most inhospitable environments,
then it can absolutely happen on an alien moon. However, these discoveries aren’t completely
without cause for concern. There have been many stories in science-fiction of strange,
dangerous creatures living in the Antarctic, from alien lifeforms to primordial pathogens. On the
other side of the world, in the Arctic Circle, the town of Longyearbyen in Norway is famous for
supposedly forbidding its residents to die. Now, this isn’t really true, but what is true is that
nobody is allowed to be buried there in a coffin. That’s because it’s too cold there for bodies
to decompose. What makes this alarming is the presence in the local cemetery of the 1918 Spanish
flu, which killed millions of people around the world. It’s inactive, but the idea of long-buried
viruses lurking beneath the ice is still a chilling one. Fortunately, since so few humans
have actually been to Antarctica, it’s unlikely that there’s anything deadly to humans there.
Having said that, it has been claimed that the opposite is true: that Antarctica’s noble Emperor
penguins are at risk of catching human diseases if we continue visiting and interacting with them.
Not only does Antarctica hold the answers to some of Earth’s greatest mysteries, but some of
the greatest mysteries in the entire universe, and they’re just waiting for us to come along
and solve them. And that’s what’s REALLY under the ice in Antarctica.
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