10: Mysterious Ice Ship In a shocking discovery from Antarctica, what
appears to be a huge ship locked in an iceberg has been spotted in satellite images.
The ship appears to be about 400 feet (121 m) long, totally encased in ice 100 miles
(160 km) from the coast.
Authorities don’t yet know exactly where the ship came from or how it became trapped
in ice, as there are no records of a ship this size going missing near Antarctica.
The vessel is a total mystery, and all we can really do is guess at what happened here.
The biggest clue is that the ship looks like a cruise liner.
It also appears to be completely on its side.
You can even see the rows of windows from the cabins all along the hull and the smokestacks
on the top of the boat.
One of the wilder theories is that the boat stuck in the iceberg was from a lost Nazi
base built in Antarctica nearly a century ago.
More realistically, this was a ghost ship that was abandoned at sea and floated down
to Antarctica.
Then it tipped over, froze, and became one with a huge sheet of ice.
While that is one possibility, it’s also potentially just one big hunk of ice that
looks remarkably like a giant ship.
What do you think?
Tell me in the comments!
9: The World’s Longest Canyon Underneath the Greenland ice sheet, researchers
have discovered evidence of the longest canyon ever.
And yes, it's even longer than the world famous Grand Canyon.
The enormous gorge goes all the way from the highest point in central Greenland to the
Petermann Glacier on the northwest coast.
That's a distance of over 460 miles (740 km).
But researchers believe the ravine in the canyon could be even longer, going farther
south, deep beneath the ice sheet where scientists can't see.
If the ice wasn't here blocking the canyon, it would look almost identical to the huge
chasm that’s so famous in Arizona.
It's 2600 feet (792 m) deep at some points and up to six miles (9.6 km) wide.
It also has distinctive, V-shaped walls and a flat bottom.
Researchers say this probably means the canyon was carved by flowing water.
It's not the deepest canyon in the world, as that award still goes to the Mariana Trench
at 35,827 feet (10,920 m).
But it is the longest, even beating the 308-mile-long (495 km) Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in China.
What makes this discovery especially interesting is the answers to questions that scientists
have been asking for years.
Everyone has always wondered what happens to water as it melts under Greenland’s ice
sheet.
We know that it drains into the sea instead of pooling anywhere in the middle.
But now we can see that the water is collecting at the bottom of a huge canyon and then being
routed directly into the ocean.
There's an entire underground river channel here, covered in a seriously thick layer of
ice.
8: Horse DNA in the Soil About a decade ago, soil samples were taken
from Canada’s Klondike region in the Yukon, scooped out from under a thick layer of permafrost.
But instead of any scientific analysis being done to the samples, they were just stuck
in a Canadian freezer at McMaster University.
It wasn't until just a few months ago that researchers took the frozen soil samples out
to see what they could find inside them.
And what they discovered is quite frankly shocking.
These icy soil samples revealed DNA from a species of wooly mammoth and from species
of wild horses that have been extinct for thousands of years.
If you're wondering how animal DNA was found in the soil, it's not the same DNA you're
probably thinking of.
It's called environmental DNA, composed of microscopic residue left behind by a variety
of animals as they move through a particular environment.
By picking apart the DNA samples, scientists were able to see that animals from the Ice
Age lived a lot longer than we had ever imagined before going extinct.
What really shocked researchers, and indeed scientists around the world, is that the DNA
present in the samples came from just 5000 years ago.
That means the wooly mammoths and Ice Age horses, the ancestors of North American horses,
were still alive in Canada alongside humans.
They lived for 8000 years longer than scientists previously thought.
7: Frozen Brazilian Yacht The Mar Sem Film, which in English translates
roughly to “Endless Sea”, is a Brazilian yacht that was frozen in a solid brick of
ice.
The ship broke apart in Maxwell Bay on April 7, 2012.
How?
The yacht, which belonged to the famed Brazilian journalist and entrepreneur João Lara Mesquita,
was manned by four crews who were filming a documentary off the Antarctic coast when
the boat ultimately capsized after being pummeled with strong winds of over 40 knots, along
with waves estimated to be nearly six feet tall (1.8 m).
The researchers were forced to radio for help before they all froze to death.
Luckily there happened to be a Chilean Navy base in the area.
They were rescued by the Navy, though there was nothing that could be done about the yacht.
It sank, but it didn't get far.
The yacht only made it about 30 feet (9.1 m) deep, before the water froze, the vessel’s
hull split in half, and it became trapped in ice.
It made for an eerie picture, trapped beneath the surface and still clearly visible from
above.
The yacht’s owner waited 10 months until the ice thawed and an attempt to recover the
boat could finally be made.
Ultimately, the time spent under the ice and the hull damage was too great to be repaired.
Even once they got the ship back onto the shore, it was completely broken and beyond
fixing, destined only for the salvage yard.
6: Dangerous Gases Rising temperatures in the Arctic are causing
a change in the environment.
In the black spruce forests found in central Alaska along the Tanana River, trees have
been tipping over, toppling to the ground, and slowly being absorbed by a soupy bog.
Where once the ground was hard-packed ice, today it’s more of a sloppy swamp of rain
and snow melt.
There's no denying that the world is steadily getting warmer and the permafrost in the north
is thawing.
One of the most horrendous things to come from all this melting permafrost is an increase
in greenhouse gasses.
A recent study done by Alaska scientist Merritt Turetsky and his team have found that under
the ice, there is a lot more gas than previously thought.
They have confirmed in recent years that as the ice thaws, huge bursts of gas are gushing
into the atmosphere.
It's a process known as abrupt thaw, with gasses being released from the ice contributing
majorly to the very issue causing all this gas to be released in the first place.
Still, all the gas being found under the ice doesn't have nearly as big of an impact as
what people are doing by burning coal and creating other emissions.
Thawing permafrost is, however, expected to amplify climate change caused by humans.
According to a recent report from National Geographic, the effects will be amplified
by about 20%.
And all because of gas under the ice.
5: Jewels on a French Glacier Back in 2013, a mountaineer was climbing Mont
Blanc, a French glacier, when he came across a literal treasure.
The treasure was stashed inside a metal box, which experts say was on board a plane from
India that crashed into the mountain over 50 years earlier.
The mountaineer couldn't believe his luck when he pried open the metal box and was staring
at a trove of emeralds, sapphires, and rubies.
They were just sitting right there, the metal box half frozen in a chunk of glacier ice.
In total, the treasure is worth an estimated $340,000.
The mountaineer turned out to be a really good citizen as well.
After he finished climbing the mountain, he handed the treasure over to the local authorities.
He didn't want to accidentally steal somebody’s precious gems.
Additionally, if you find treasure in the mountains, French law says you have to give
it to the police.
And in the end, being a good citizen really paid off.
Eight years after the discovery, local authorities finally agreed to split the profit from the
gemstones with the climber.
That's a total profit for him of $169,000.
But you're probably wondering what the box of treasure had to do with the plane that
crashed.
In 1950 and in 1966, there were plane crashes on Mont Blanc, both of them Air India planes.
Over the years, climbers have occasionally stumbled upon chunks of debris, human bodies,
and even pieces of luggage frozen in the ice.
Authorities say the precious stones were probably from the flight in 1966, bound for New York.
The crash killed 117 people, and one of them had apparently brought a whole horde of jewels
into America.
What would you do if you found a box of jewels frozen in ice on the side of a mountain?
Would you hand it over to the authorities or stash it away and try to sell it yourself?
Let me know in the comments and don't forget to hit subscribe before the end of the video!
4: Cold War Fossils Back during the Cold War, the US was busy
digging out a chunk of northwestern Greenland as part of Project Iceworm.
It was in 1966, a covert mission to create a nuclear base beneath the Greenland ice sheet
capable of striking the Soviet Union with nuclear warheads.
The project was kept top secret until decades later, and even still it's hard to believe
the US tried something so unusual.
Creating a subterranean ice base sounds more like the plot of a spy flick than an actual
US military project.
But the mission was a failure.
Project Iceworm was ultimately ended.
Camp Century, the base itself, was abandoned.
So too were ice core samples taken by scientists during the initial construction of the base.
But the US didn’t care about boring old ice cores back then, so the samples were stuffed
into a freezer in Denmark and ignored for decades.
Then in 2019, a group of scientists finally investigated what the Cold War scientists
had dug up, and it’s really quite fascinating.
The scientists found fragments of fossilized plants, lifeforms that bloomed millions of
years ago.
These plants prove that Greenland hasn't really been covered in ice for that long.
Up until now, it was believed that Greenland had been covered in ice for three million
years.
But that couldn't possibly be the case.
The fossilized plants show beyond a doubt that there was significant tundra-like climate
on Greenland during that time, which wouldn’t have been possible if the ice wasn’t there.
Scientists believe that at some point in the last 2.6 million years, Greenland lost its
giant ice sheet, shifted to a tundra, and eventually regained its ice.
3: Expedition Ship Frozen Solid In 2014, an Antarctic expedition ship became
stranded in the ice.
Members of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition on board the MV Akademik Shokalskiy got stuck
for 10 days at Christmas, with absolutely no way out.
They had to call in a Chinese icebreaker to come to their rescue, along with a reroute
of an Australian icebreaker to help.
They originally called a French icebreaker, but it had to retreat when it became clear
that the ice was so thick that even it couldn't help the ship out.
52 members of the expedition were trapped until a helicopter team finally came to airlift
the scientist and tourists to safety.
When the ship got stuck, it was trying to make its way through clear water to a small
cluster of rocky islands called the Hodgeman Islands.
But the clear water suddenly froze, the ice came out of nowhere, and they couldn't move.
By Christmas Eve, the captain realized there was no way they could get to the open water
just two nautical miles in front of them.
The ice was thick and just kept accumulating.
After a few more days, open water was no longer two nautical miles ahead, but 20 nautical
miles.
That's just how fast the ice builds up in Antarctica.
With almost no warning, the ship was trapped in a rapidly growing iceberg.
With international help, the ship was finally freed.
But it was a very close call!
2: Ultrahot Superionic Ice Scientists have made a fascinating new discovery
involving ice.
They call the discovery ultrahot superionic ice, and it appears to be a new and mysterious
phase of water never seen before.
Scientists created this new form of ice by squeezing a water droplet between a pair of
diamonds and then blasting it with one of the most powerful lasers in the world.
See, science is fun!!
The superionic ice is actually water that exists at the same pressure and temperature
as what can be found at the center of the Earth.
Prior to this discovery, researchers had only managed to create superionic ice for 20 nanoseconds
before it dissolved.
They did this using shock waves.
But by squeezing a water droplet between the diamonds and then blasting it with the laser
to temperatures found inside a star, they were able to make the ice stable enough to
study.
This is now the 18th phase of ice to be discovered, and one of the weirdest.
Its oxygen atoms lock into place just like they normally do when water freezes, but the
hydrogen atoms give up their electrons and become ions, free flowing as if fluid.
What this means is that ultrahot superionic ice is both a solid and a liquid at the same
time.
It's a cube of ice with flowing hydrogen atoms inside of it.
Pretty incredible, huh?
Would you ever think of blasting lasers at diamond-squeezed water droplets?
1: Mysteriously Draining Lakes NASA has discovered a mysterious system of
draining lakes beneath the Antarctic ice.
They found two new lakes of frigid water between 1.2 and 2.5 miles (1.9 and 4.0 km) beneath
the ice on the southernmost part of the continent.
What's truly strange is that these subterranean lakes fill and drain repeatedly in a cycle
that scientists say could influence how meltwater flows into the Southern Ocean.
And of course, the flow of meltwater from the ice is what influences currents in the
Southern Ocean, affecting temperatures across the world.
The lakes are located at the very bottom of the ice sheet, where the ice touches the rocky
part of the Antarctic continent.
Scientists believe the lakes are formed as a result of pressure and friction, and maybe
even geothermal heat from below.
Whatever the case, scientists only discovered the lakes because of NASA’s ICESat satellite
using lasers to measure elevations of the ice.
As the lakes fill and then drain, the ice above rises and falls.
This shows there’s a lake system beneath, releasing water into the ocean.
How much water?
In January, scientists found that just one of these lakes, located beneath the Amery
Ice Shelf in Eastern Antarctica, flushed about 198 billion gallons, or 750 billion liters,
into the ocean in just three days.
And while this may sound kind of boring, it’s actually a critical system that influences
seasonal dips in temperature as cold air currents move around the world.
Discovering why billions of gallons of horribly cold water are dumped into the ocean from
beneath the ice is key in understanding how all the weather systems of our world are connected.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever heard of being found under the ice?
Let me know about it in the comments and thanks a lot for watching the video.
Remember to hit subscribe and come back soon for more amazing content!
Until next time!