10 Most Incredible Things Found in Antarctica

life and survival on the terrain of the Antarctic is hard but the unique qualities of the land mean it plays host to many strange wonders standing on the Antarctic is like standing on the surface of an alien world and so some of the creatures and geographic features to be found there have a lien properties of their own here are just some of the phenomena that you won't believe exists on planet Earth we know that dinosaurs once dominated most of the surface of our home planet but we didn't know for certain that the giant lizards once made it as far as Antarctica until their fossilized remains were unearthed there for the first time in 1996 James Ross Island which sits northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula had been hiding the 70 million year old fossils until an Argentinean expedition led by the Explorer Eduardo Oliveira finally located them at the time of their discovery the fossils didn't appear to belong to any dinosaur we'd encountered before but subsequent research has identified them as ankylosaur bones not only did the find act as evidence that dinosaurs once thrived on the continent it also suggested that the entire Antarctic continent was once connected to Australia and South America it may not have been quite as icy when the dinosaurs roamed the earth they say that the older a bottle of wine is the better the taste it appears the same might apply to whiskey because this 100 year old recovered Antarctic whisky is said to be outstanding the legendary polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton had the McKinley's rare old Highland malt whiskey brought along in an expedition to the South Pole in 1907 in order to fortify himself and his team but had to abandon it along with his whole expedition in 1909 they were then buried under a century of ice and snow but a team from New Zealand managed to extract a single crate in which 10 bottles still survived perfectly preserved by the conditions they were painstakingly thought out over a two-week period and then flown to the whip and Mackay distillery in Scotland who said about the task of recreating the whiskey so people could buy replicas there's no substitute for the taste of the original though which is described as light and mellow we think of icebergs and glaciers as being white or in rare cases of clear blue those who have seen the Antarctic with their own eyes though relay stories of giant green icebergs solid as rocks and flawless and structure with no bubbles or cracks in the ice the reason for the strange coloring has perplexed scientists for years until a breakthrough was made in early 2019 it had been thought that dissolved organic material might be responsible for the peculiar hue but that isn't the case samples taken in 2016 have revealed that the green icebergs contain high concentration of iron oxide taken from the rocks that exist below the Antarctic ice sheets the iron is a necessary nutrient for the growth of phytoplankton which is rare in the southern seas icebergs containing the iron oxide do more than just look stunning they bring life into the water as they travel you wouldn't expect temperatures of up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit if you are visiting the Antarctic but they're there if you know where to look for them on the icy plains of Ross Island sits Mount Erebus an active volcano that heats up a network of recently discovered caves below the surface having found the caves an Australian team decided to look for signs of life and found evidence of DNA in the soil excitingly that DNA revealed the presence of animals animals of a kind we've never encountered before the next challenge is for a brave survey team to probe deeper within these unexplored and hard-to-reach caves seeking out whatever may be hiding down there if any unknown creatures are looking below the ice hopefully they'll be friendly if there is strange new life inside those caves it won't be alone just because humans aren't well-equipped to survive in Antarctica doesn't mean other creatures can't make their home there an american survey team recently spent six weeks researching the previously unexplored mercer subglacial Lake the lake is huge twice the size of the city of Manhattan and had only been inspected remotely via satellite before the researchers found a lot more than they bargained for carcasses belonging to new species of crustacean were everywhere along with an unknown eight-legged tardigrade all the samples were gathered by drilling six feet below the frozen surface of the lake and could indicate that undiscovered life still exists down there if it does it will tell us a lot about where to look for life in other frozen environments including distant planets [Music] we know the low temperatures and packed ice of the Antarctic can preserve most things buried there but to find out that it could protect and save something as delicate as a set of photo negatives was a real surprise a conservation team from New Zealand were restoring an abandoned exploration hunt left over from the 1914 Shackleton expedition when they came across a box trapped inside the ice containing 100 year old photo negatives a difficult process than followed the negatives had bound together when they froze and so they had to be carefully separated and then cleaned before being developed using modern digital technology geologist Andrew Stevens is visible on many of the pictures suggesting they may once have belonged to him the images are a priceless glimpse at life onboard the exploration vessel Aurora and the Shackleton team's journey into the harsh terrain earlier on we saw evidence that the whole Antarctic continent was once located further north in a much more temperate climate the discovery of fossilized rainforest cements that idea as a fact sediment samples collected by scientists drilling into Antarctica's coasts have provided a picture of what life was like there 52 million years ago and all the signs suggest plant life that could only have been possible in a climate of at least 60 degrees fahrenheit as well as the fossils there were traces of pollen inside the sediment samples along with proof of palm and fern trees which would be more suited to Madagascar than the icy Tundra if you had a time machine and took a long long trip backward you could have visited Antarctica for a beach vacation it takes a very special type of creature to survive in Antarctica we've talked about the potential existence of fauna we've never seen before but there's a type of spider that definitely does and it's like no other spider on earth these ocean based arthropods which have a leg span wider than a dinner plate exist in the frozen waters that lap Antarctica and have a circulatory system unlike anything scientists have ever seen before their blood is pumped around their bodies by contractions within their intestines which are in their legs on top of that they absorb oxygen through their skin instead of breathing they don't have any lungs or gills the spiders which are technically pike no gonna do instead of arachnids because they live in water are definitely unusual but they're harmless they are peaceful slow-moving creatures who come in a range of colors and they don't bite we said we were going to show you great mysteries and these strange objects are exactly that mysteries you're looking at overhead shots of a 1.2 mile long line of very similar objects stretching across the Antarctic taken in 2016 they're all similar but on closer inspection are subtly different from each other so it's not a photography fault they all have a dark Center and some of them appear to contain dim red lights nobody knows what they are there's a German research base nearby but that consists of one building with no known connection to these objects earlier pictures from 2013 suggest that something has been moved either from the station to the objects or in the other direction no photos exist prior to 2013 so it's impossible to know how long the objects have been there there were persistent rumors that the Germans were building a remote base in the Antarctic during the 1940s as a hideaway did they succeed or is this something totally different we are sure you have your own piñon so let us know in the comments we haven't yet found evidence of actual Yeti in Antarctica but we can show you a Yeti crab the long theorized crabs were found in 2015 living in hydrothermal vents across Antarctica's East Scotia Ridge the new species named Kiawah Tulare are an offshoot of a family of short squat lobsters that live in warm waters around hydrothermal vents there are a lot of them too estimates suggest there are as many as 700 of them within every square meter of water although the water here is warm in comparison with the land around it it's still cold by any other measure which is why the crabs have distinctive furry bodies they never leave the vents because they wouldn't survive the freezing water outside of them but strangely they do release their larvae there as the larvae can only survive in the cold when hatched the newborn crabs come straight back to the vents trapped in a tiny location and unable to go outside of its a hunt the crabs survive by eating the bacteria that grow on their fur [Music] this next piece of news should serve as a warning to everyone some people like to deny that climate change is a reality but the evidence for it is all around us all you need to do is take a look at the enormous size of this hole in the foie Dee's glacier the glacier is the size of Florida and for the sake of comparison the hole is almost the size of Manhattan with a height of 300 meters scientists who usually work with NASA investigated the hole searching for signs of gaps between the ice and the bedrock below it they weren't expecting anything this huge the most worrying thing about the hole is that it wasn't there three years ago 14 billion tons of ice have melted in just 36 months if the entire thought Eze glacier were to melt the global sea level would rise by 65 centimeters which works out at a little more than two feet that could have devastating consequences for sea animal and human life Antarctica may not play host to a great deal of life but it can provide us with a note of caution about dangers to life all over the world subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and you will be the first to know when a new video comes out thank you for watching and see you soon

Channel: Amazing Stock

Views: 652,144

Rating: 4.5028248 out of 5

Keywords: things found, found in Antarctica, frozen in ice, mysterious discoveries, found frozen in ice, amazing discoveries, mysterious findings, frozen discoveries, Antarctica, mysterious places, underground lake, unexplained mysteries, glacier, top 10, 10 most

Id: LHUtrWWUgR8

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2019