What's Hidden Under Antarctica?

0:00 Ready?

0:05 When you fly over Antarctica all you see is white.

0:12 You don't hear any birds.

0:14 You don't see any plants.

0:16 It looks empty, but there's something hiding down below this ice.

0:23 In 1970, a group of Soviet scientists started drilling right here.

0:28 For 28 years they kept going and going until after nearly 4000m.

0:36 They suddenly stopped because they had found something unimaginable.

0:41 Liquid water.

0:43 A secret lake, down below all this ice that had been completely

0:49 sealed off from the rest of the world for 15 million years.

0:54 How?!

0:55 And...

0:55 is there something alive in there?

0:59 Creatures that have been evolving separately from the rest

1:03 of the planet for 15 million years?

1:06 So scientists started searching for more of these secret lakes.

1:09 And as they did, they realized there is way

1:13 more going on under Antarctica than we ever thought.

1:19 I needed to know the truth about Earth's most remote continent.

1:24 So I've come all the way to Antarctica

1:27 to show you what's really happening down below this ice,

1:32 and exactly what they discovered when they finally broke inside.

1:38 Bring out the drill!

1:47 Ready?

1:48 If you wanted to drill to the bottom of Antarctica.

1:51 The first thing you need to realize is this ice is way thicker than you think.

1:56 If we were to take a chunk out of this ice and place it on the surface,

2:00 at its thickest, it would be this tall.

2:05 Wow.

2:07 That's nearly the height of Mount Kilimanjaro.

2:10 You would have to stack the tallest building

2:12 in the world six times to reach the top of that!

2:16 And this isn't just one uniform block.

2:18 It's full of all different kinds of ice.

2:21 And if you looked into the hole left behind by our chunk, you'd see land!

2:28 So as we start drilling, at first we're passing through snow,

2:32 which is surprisingly scarce here because Antarctica is the driest,

2:36 coldest, windiest continent on Earth.

2:39 It's technically a desert.

2:41 I can confirm it is very cold and very windy.

2:46 On average, it only snows a couple centimeters a year here,

2:49 meaning the snow just a few feet under your boots could be from a decade ago,

2:52 but as our drill makes its way through this snow, the texture starts to change.

2:57 "The snow then, of course, keeps accumulating and the deeper layers

3:01 become consolidated into firn." That's Dr.

3:04 Steven Chown, a biologist who specializes in life on Antarctica.

3:08 He's leading the trip I'm on with the White

3:10 Desert Foundation's “Science Week.” It

3:12 supports scientific research in Antarctica.

3:14 The “firn” that he's talking about is the stage between snow and ice.

3:18 It looks like a frozen sponge.

3:20 So we're drilling through this frozen sponge.

3:22 And before we reach the point where it actually turns into ice,

3:25 we hit something alarming.

3:33 I don't know why driving over it feels so much scarier than walking over.

3:37 It really does.

3:38 The reason to be scared is that as we're drilling through the firn,

3:42 it's not staying still.

3:43 As the snow and ice builds up its own weight,

3:46 slowly pushes it over the land toward the coasts.

3:49 And then, as it reaches the end of the continent,

3:52 it leaves the land and extends out over the ocean.

3:55 That's called the ice shelf.

3:56 The problem is, as this giant ice sheet slowly flows across the rocky ground,

4:02 it stretches and contracts.

4:04 And if it stretches too fast, the firn snaps, creating...

4:11 I'm about to go down into that crevasse.

4:13 You would never know it was here.

4:15 Oh my God.

4:17 This is a little bit of a test of my claustrophobia.

4:21 Bye!

4:24 Into the darkness we go.

4:26 Whoa.

4:27 It's huge.

4:31 This is incredible.

4:36 You would never think this is down here.

4:38 Look how deep this is.

4:39 You would not want to fall down into one of these.

4:42 I'm gonna...

4:43 I'm gonna get out now.

4:45 This is the amount of time that I want to spend underground.

4:49 So to not fall into a crevasse and to know what's coming down below us,

4:53 we need to do a lot of prep.

4:55 So back in the 1950s, scientists would explode TNT on the surface to measure

5:01 the seismic waves that would bounce back through the ice.

5:04 Today, they shoot lasers from satellites that bounce off the surface,

5:09 and any wrinkles or sagging give us hints at what's below.

5:14 TNT, space lasers.

5:15 Scientists are awesome.

5:19 But to really get underneath in detail,

5:21 they mostly shoot ice penetrating radar down from planes like this plane!

5:27 They crisscross the continent,

5:28 filling in a picture of what's really underneath Antarctica.

5:33 And what they can now see is the outline of an ancient world.

5:43 It's not flat.

5:44 There's a trench deeper than the Grand Canyon,

5:47 a completely hidden mountain range that rivals the European Alps.

5:52 Evidence of a massive impact crater and the largest volcanic region on Earth.

5:58 But in the late 60s, as they were flying these ice penetrating radar planes,

6:03 they suddenly spotted something especially strange.

6:06 "They also saw these weird depressions, a really big one,: like flat spots?

6:10 "Yeah, sort of a tiny depression" That earlier research

6:13 with the TNT had hinted that there was something odd here too.

6:17 And that Soviet drilling team?

6:18 They're drilling right on top of it.

6:21 So let's go deeper.

6:23 The deeper we go.

6:24 It's like we're going back in time,

6:26 layers upon layers stacked on top of each other.

6:30 The pores in the spongy firn get squished and the air

6:34 inside gets locked in, creating little bubbles from that time in history.

6:38 So now we're passing the Renaissance, the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt,

6:45 when humans started farming,

6:48 there's the extinction of Neanderthals and the first modern humans.

6:54 "And you can analyze that record by drilling

6:57 a core all the way down through the ice." Wow.

7:00 This is not easy.

7:04 Is it going down?!

7:06 I can't tell!

7:12 Oh, awesome.

7:18 "So here you can tell the story of the ice.

7:20 So if you hold it up against the light,

7:21 you can see some of the layers." I see it!

7:24 Wow.

7:27 Look at all these bubbles.

7:28 Those are pieces of atmosphere from decades or centuries ago.

7:32 But it's not just bubbles.

7:34 It's also sort of these tree rings of different.

7:37 I don't know what to call it.

7:38 Shades of ice?

7:40 "Exactly." But if you hold it up,

7:42 you can see that there are actually lines in it.

7:44 Ice that forms in winter has

7:46 a different texture and composition than summer ice, creating these lines.

7:50 And you can count them like tree rings,

7:52 but you can also see huge sudden changes:

7:55 "Where you can see certain events like a volcano eruption,

7:58 for instance." Like this!

8:00 That dark line is ash from a volcano eruption over 20,000 years ago.

8:06 And as I was looking at these layers of exposed ice,

8:10 I realized why scientists said were not allowed

8:13 to do something while we're hiking on Antarctica.

8:16 This is why you can't pee on the ice.

8:19 Because if you did, one day some descendant

8:23 of yours would be taking an ice core in Antarctica,

8:27 and they'd dig and dig and dig and they'd pull it out and they'd say,

8:30 “What's that yellow line?” It's a funny way

8:33 to understand what's really so important about this ice.

8:36 It's this incredible record of Earth and life on Earth that we can learn from.

8:42 "For me, one of the most amazing,

8:45 cool science things is that a team from Europe has found a core.

8:51 It's 1.3 million years and pulled they it out,

8:55 and they haven't yet analyzed it, but it's in the lab." Oh, that’s so exciting.

8:59 When can we expect it?

9:00 "I reckon in the next couple of years." Awesome.

9:03 "And that'll be the longest history of the planet's climate in ice." Oh my God.

9:17 As I was hiking, I said how lifeless everything looked.

9:20 And then Dr.

9:21 Chown told me to go find a white rock and look underneath it.

9:26 It became kind of a mission as we were hiking around,

9:29 and at first I really didn't understand why.

9:32 Mico, I went for a hike.

9:33 I'm in Antarctica right now and I was picking up white rocks.

9:38 Why would under a white rock be a good place to find life,

9:42 as opposed to just under any rock?

9:44 "Those white rocks can let a little bit of light filter through,

9:48 almost like a natural greenhouse effect for those tiny organisms underneath.

9:52 It's a really neat adaptation." So this is Mico.

9:55 It's like Clippy, but way smarter, actually.

9:58 Wait, hold on one second.

9:59 There's a secret way to turn it into.

10:01 Yeah!

10:01 I find that talking out loud to it sometimes helps

10:04 me figure out what I'm most interested in, and then

10:06 I can go deeper into the research and figure

10:08 out which way I want to go with the story.

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

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

10:19 The ice has completely changed.

10:22 There are no bubbles.

10:23 There's no dust.

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

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

10:31 It's coming ...from below.

10:34 After decades of drilling and radar and seismic

10:36 and satellite data there was only one explanation.

10:40 A lake.

10:41 And not just any lake.

10:43 It's huge.

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

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

10:53 It's called Lake Vostok.

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

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

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

11:07 But more importantly, sitting under all this ice is ~350 times

11:11 more pressure than what you feel at sea level.

11:15 And as pressure rises, water stays liquid at lower temperatures,

11:21 which means ...a massive under ice lake is possible.

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

11:30 And if it was isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years,

11:35 what would it look like?

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

11:42 Should they poke it?

11:43 "They realized they could potentially go all the way

11:47 through into the lake water." Was that risky?

11:50 "Yeah.

11:50 Oh, totally.

11:51 Nobody knew what would happen.

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

11:55 Would it, you know, would it be really super dangerous?" "We actually looked

12:00 at this very closely because we don't want to kill anybody." Oh, good.

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

12:07 "If you take a Pepsi bottle and you put in a Mentos,

12:10 these little minty things, and blow it in, it just blows up.

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

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

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

12:21 It took a good portion of my life." But during this time,

12:25 studies kept finding more and more lakes.

12:27 Hundreds of them.

12:28 And satellites revealed something very weird.

12:32 The ice sheet was lifting and dropping almost ten meters in some places, and Dr.

12:39 Helen Fricker was the first to notice.

12:41 "Yeah, it was pretty incredible.

12:42 It was one of those, like, jaw-dropping moments." While Vostok and other lakes

12:46 like it sat sealed off around the continent,

12:48 there were hundreds of other active lakes that can literally lift and drop

12:53 parts of the ice sheet as they filled and drained into one another.

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

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

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

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

13:11 So at this point, over a decade had passed since

13:13 drilling had paused at Vostok and we'd learned so much.

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

13:20 It was for three countries to drill into three lakes:

13:24 the Russians into Lake Vostok,

13:26 the British into Lake Ellsworth, and the Americans into Lake Whillans.

13:31 Time to poke an ancient lake!

13:33 First up, the Russians.

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

13:37 But they had a problem.

13:39 There hole was already filled with drill fluid to prevent it from freezing,

13:43 specifically kerosene.

13:44 So to solve this problem, they added freon, which is heavier,

13:47 and the idea was that it would act like a plug.

13:49 And then they used the special drill with a heated

13:52 tip to slowly melt into the surface of the lake.

13:55 And as soon as they broke through, the pressurized water from the lake,

13:58 shot up over 30m into the hole, pushing the kerosene and the freon away.

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

14:07 It was a little scary.

14:08 I'd be running as fast as I could." They left

14:10 that new lake water in the hole to freeze for a season,

14:13 and then they pulled it up to study it,

14:15 and the headlines said that they found a totally new type of bacteria!

14:20 But those bacteria were suspiciously similar to the bacteria found in kerosene.

14:25 "Problem was that it mixed with the drilling fluid,

14:28 which is highly contaminated.

14:29 It's full of bacteria.

14:30 so they didn't publish anything." "That was

14:33 controversial because many people said they had

14:37 contaminated with drill fluid." So the international

14:39 science community was skeptical of the Russian find,

14:42 but the British and the American teams were still trying to poke their lakes,

14:46 and they were using a different drilling tech that didn't use drill fluid,

14:50 but super clean hot water that was filtered and decontaminated with UV light.

14:55 This boiling, pressurized water just blasts and melts away the ice,

14:59 but it still needed fuel to power the thing.

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

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

15:09 So now, with only one team left,

15:12 they slowly went deeper and deeper and deeper until finally...

15:20 "And I remember breaking into the lake and you could hear the cheers.

15:23 The whole roar went up.

15:24 It was pretty...

15:25 I had goosebumps and we broke through." So they

15:28 bring up a sample of liquid water from this lake, and inside they find life.

15:35 Tons of life!

15:37 A full ecosystem with colonies of bacteria

15:40 and tiny organisms that were all thriving without sunlight.

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

15:50 Dr.

15:50 Priscu gave us a sneak peek of the research

15:52 that he's about to publish from that lake.

15:54 And it seems to show that some of the life under

15:59 Antarctica is genuinely new and different than anywhere else on Earth.

16:04 "We found some new kinds of viruses that are bacteria viruses." Don't worry.

16:09 These are viruses that are specific to bacteria.

16:11 They're not going to infect you.

16:13 I was worried about that too.

16:14 I want to study them.

16:15 I just want to never get them.

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

16:19 I mean, I'm still alive." Do you think.

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

16:28 "Yeah.

16:28 That's another.

16:29 That's a good question.

16:30 We looked around, we took an ROV and we had cameras going,

16:33 so unless they were avoiding us, there’s not." But that new microbial life is

16:39 really special because while it's new to us...

16:42 "So Antarctica hasn't always been fully covered with ice

16:45 So maybe the new life we find is old life.

16:48 Old new life." Using this new research,

16:50 we can learn about the origins of life on our planet and even beyond it.

16:57 One of the coolest things about this story is that all of this science,

17:01 all of this drilling through incredibly thick

17:03 ice and not contaminating it or us,

17:05 and all of this technology is exactly what we would

17:09 use to explore the icy moons and planets for alien life.

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

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

17:27 "Yes.

17:28 Yes, definitely." We found life in one of the coldest,

17:32 darkest, most alien places on Earth.

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

17:39 And while scientists think it's very unlikely

17:41 that any of them contain larger life forms, what's inside is still a mystery.

17:46 "It's just cool.

17:47 Science is amazing and humans are amazing for doing this." "We

17:51 have a lot more to explore." Exploring has never been easy.

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

17:58 You know, it's just an incredible thing." but it's worth it.

18:02 There are still untouched places left

18:06 to be discovered and new mysteries to solve.

18:10 HUGE*, if true.

18:11 We're making another episode all about what really happened with the ozone

18:15 layer on Antarctica and the current science happening right now.

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

18:27 "We haven’t even shown you the ancient aliens

18:28 and the ice wall and the government conspiracies.

18:31 The pyramids underneath.

18:33 So much here though." "Like and subscribe,

18:35 because the conspiracies are out there and they don't want

18:38 you to know about them." We want come to us

18:41 and we will tell you." "I think there's one

18:43 of the aliens right now." That's that's what you're hearing.

18:45 Yeah.

18:46 Oh, no.