As far as mysterious places go, Antarctica has a lot going for it, including a ton of
frozen treasures and fascinating surprises just waiting to be discovered.
Here are some of the craziest frozen treasures found in Antarctica.
Antarctica is a remote enough chunk of the Earth as it is, but the speckle of tiny Antarctic
islands surrounding the continent is ridiculously remote.
Some of these islands are almost impossible to get a plane to fly over, let alone land
on.
One of these remote islands is Saunders Island, situated around 1,000 miles off the eastern
edge of Antarctica's coastline, and researchers analyzing high-resolution South Pole satellite
imagery spotted something unusual about Mount Michael, the largest mountain on Saunders
Island.
Usually, the mountain is covered in a dense blanket of cloud.
However, very occasionally, the skies clear over Saunders Island.
On one of those rare days, satellite imagery revealed an unexpected glowing orange patch
at the mountain's peak.
Yes, it's a huge lake of bubbling lava.
As far as we know, only seven other similar lava lakes exist on Earth.
Not surprisingly, geologists are keen to learn more about this odd mountain at the end of
the world, but it'll likely be several years before a surveillance aircraft can get there
to take a closer look.
A long-dormant volcano, Mount Erebus rises 12,000 feet over Antarctica's summit plateau.
Antarctica is bleak.
But the top of that mountain makes bleak look inviting.
Until 2011, scientists believed that nothing lived there.
Then, in a chain of volcanic ice caves, scientists discovered a unique microbe.
Starved of any other nutrients, these little micro-gremlins evolved a way to chow down
on a diet of rock and trace metals.
As Jeff Goldblum famously said:
"Life, uh, finds a way."
In what sounds like a great lead-in to a B-grade Antarctica horror movie, one of the investigating
scientists told Livescience:
"We feel that these ice caves deserve a role in the...sites that we study for deep, dark
environments."
Have none of these scientists seen The Abyss?
You might already know that the continent of Antarctica is encased in a thick layer
of nearly impenetrable ice.
As for what lies beneath it?
Until recently, the consensus was that you'd find even more ice.
And if you kept digging, the thinking was that you'd hit "tectonic block", basically
just solid, rigid, featureless rock.
In 2018, enhanced satellite imaging revealed something far cooler.
Beneath all that ice lies a geological jigsaw puzzle.
Some of the rock down there resembles bedrock you'd find in Australia.
Other rocky remnants closely resemble India's geological foundations.
There's even a variety of seafloor remnants.
We don't know precisely when this occurred in our planet's history, but lying beneath
Antarctica's icy cover are the torn-up remnants of an ancient supercontinent.
In 2016, a team of intrepid researchers set out to explore a deep oceanic channel almost
a mile under the ice.
They discovered a lush ecosystem of exotic life forms thriving beneath the ice in near-total
inky blackness.
Many of these creatures are unknown to science.
One intriguing discovery was the gigantic dinner plate-sized sea spiders, which breathe
and digest food through their legs.
Now there's an image.
Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how these creatures grow so large
in such inhospitable conditions.
And, presumably, how to keep them from growing even bigger and escaping their icy prisons.
"So that's what this was about.
Huge spiders."
Over a century ago, one of the first Antarctic explorers reported finding fossils of large
plants only a few hundred miles from the South Pole.
His findings were dismissed as delusional ramblings, but the explorer's discovery was
eventually vindicated.
A complete picture of how Antarctica has changed over time is still unclear, but we now know
that 55 million years ago, it was covered in forest.
In 2016, a team of researchers scaled McIntyre Promontory, a bleak mountain jutting out of
Antarctica's glacial ice fields, and began sifting through the scree of sedimentary rock.
Thirteen fossil fragments were recovered, some belonging to trees that grew in Antarctica
over 250 million years ago.
The ancient Antarctic trees covered the landscape, and their existence has baffled plant paleontologists.
Somehow these extremely resilient trees were capable of surviving for months in complete
darkness.
How they managed to pull it off, for now at least, remains a scientific mystery.
In the 1970s, satellite pictures revealed something bizarre on one particular ice pack
floating out on the Lazarev Sea, off the Antarctic coast: a huge hole piercing the glacier.
Surrounded by thick ice and in frigid Antarctic cold, this massive, 3,700-square-mile hole
just shouldn't have been there.
And no one could arrive at a plausible explanation for how it was formed.
In the following decades, scientists watched the hole repeatedly disappear and reappear.
Sometimes it would remain small.
At other times, it would rapidly expand to enormous dimensions and then, just as quickly,
fill over.
The hole was last seen in 2017, and it was truly massive, expanding to an area the size
of Ireland.
While the scientific community still has no definitive answers, the prevailing theory
is that the huge hole was formed by violent polar cyclones.
This nasty stain on the pristine Antarctic landscape was first encountered way back in
1911 when a team of stalwart Australian scientists stumbled across the Blood Falls.
A slow-flowing stream of deep red slurry carves its way through the pristine, white ice and
then slops horrifically down a rocky outcrop, leaving a gory, slimy trail of apparent viscera
in its wake.
The explorers theorized that the gory spectacle might be caused by an unusual kind of algal
bloom, but this was roundly dismissed given that no other life was to be found in the
area.
The mystery of the Blood Falls would remain unsolved for over 100 years.
In 2017, scientists from the University of Alaska put the mystery to rest.
Using radio-echo sounding, the researchers were able to trace the path of the bloody
water to a hidden, subterranean reservoir of iron oxide-rich water, trapped beneath
the ice for over a million years.
Cracking in the ice gradually releases this reassuringly non-cursed water, which turns
bright red the moment it comes into contact with the air.
Loopy supernatural theories and Antarctica go hand-in-hand, perhaps because it's really
hard to prove or disprove claims about a place you can't easily go and see for yourself.
Of course, you've got your garden variety humanoid merpeople.
But why stop there?
You only need to scratch at the outer surface level of crazy to discover an exotic menagerie
of hotheaded naked ice borers, bloops, and the ever-elusive Organism 46-B, a supposed
captured aquatic creature.
But recent fossil discoveries show that a real monster once lurked in Antarctica's seas.
Around 250 million years ago, Antarctanax shackletoni was sitting pretty at the top
of Antarctica's food chain.
At over 30 feet long, or a bit over the length of a bus, this creature is the largest known
polar marine predator yet discovered, and likely resembled a huge, drooling, angry-looking
iguana.
From what paleontologists know of how Earth's continents drifted, an apex predator reptile
in Antarctica at this time makes no sense.
As one researcher remarked to CNN:
"The more we find out about prehistoric Antarctica, the weirder it is."
Giant monsters and tiny microbes might be fascinating finds, but there are also less
mysterious and awe-inspiring treasures that are very intriguing to folks looking to exploit
a pristine natural wilderness for a fast buck.
Antarctica is swimming in oil.
The South Pole is thought to contain over 200 billion barrels of oil.
That's far more than the oil deposits in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi combined.
While it's true that an international treaty came into effect in 1961 to protect Antarctica
from military activity or mineral extraction, a cynic would feel obligated to point out
that a great majority of research carried out in Antarctica is geological in nature.
Governments want to know what lies beneath the ice, and you can bet they're not particularly
interested in proving or disproving theories about Atlantis.
Antarctica isn't a country, and it has no government.
Without the magical protective power of sovereignty, the greatest threat to Antarctica's pristine
state is politics, pure and simple.
There is a treaty protecting Antarctica, but it expires in 2048.
After that, who knows?
Even now countries are beginning to jostle for their patch of icy turf.
There are some crazy theories involving Antarctica.
One of the most popular is that it was once home to a powerful ancient civilization.
The typical claim you'll hear is that Antarctica's icy wastes are littered with the remnants
of abandoned structures.
And of course, Google Earth has become an important tool in the quest to discover manmade-looking
structures jutting through the ice.
Why are we finding so many of these things?
And are they really man made, or do they just look that way?
A kind of mundane explanation is that it all boils down to a psychological phenomenon known
as apophenia.
It's a natural human tendency to look for patterns, like seeing a dragon in this cloud.
This works perfectly from an evolutionary perspective because it equips us with the
mental hardware to rapidly assess risk.
An unfortunate downside though is that it's very easy to find patterns where there are
none, a false positive.
Still, every now and then, odd satellite images pop up that are interesting enough to at least
bring a twitch to a skeptic's incredulous eyebrow.
In January 2017, one such image emerged of an odd oval structure in the ice.
It's a few hundred feet across and has an oddly geometric, even human-made look to it.
Apophenia or Atlantis?
Either way, it's interesting to look at.
"Welcome to Atlantis, brother."
Scott's Antarctic Expedition is one of the most tragic stories we have of an expedition
gone horribly wrong.
In 1912, Robert Falcon Scott headed up an expedition to the South Pole.
At the time, little was known of Antarctica's interior, nor were the explorers particularly
knowledgeable of what equipment and preparation a human would need to survive such inhospitable
conditions.
The expedition was doomed from the start.
The party member's journals chronicle an excruciating journey, where one by one they slowly succumbed
to the deadly cold and malnutrition.
A year after they disappeared, Scott's remains were found with the other two remaining members
of their doomed party in a snowy tomb.
Scott lay between his comrades, clutching his diary.
His final words were:
"It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.
R Scott."
Piecing together their final journey from journal entries, it looks as though the last
survivors were only three days away from their next food depot when the fatal blizzard descended
on them.
In 1985, human remains, including an extremely well-preserved skull, were discovered on the
shores of a remote island of southern Antarctica.
The skull belonged to a woman who died in the early 1800s.
An analysis of the skull revealed she was in poor health, was nutritionally deprived,
and was most likely of indigenous Chilean descent.
The best guess at why she was there was that she was part of a sealing expedition.
The discovery has puzzled historians because Antarctica was thought to have been largely
unexplored at this time.
Moreover, the historical consensus that an indigenous Chilean woman's involvement in
a sealing expedition in the early 1800s would have been culturally unacceptable, unheard
of, even.
While we have no way of knowing who she was, it's likely she was among the first people
to set foot on Antarctica's icy shores.
The discovery also sheds light on just how long our species has coveted Antarctica's
natural resources.
While nation-states greedily eyeing Antarctica's vast oil reserves are in the news right now,
the opening chapters of that tale of acquisition and conquest began over 200 years ago.
Whoever the unknown Chilean woman was, she must have led a short but interesting life.
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