(dramatic music) - How did we get this? A map so detailed, so precise, that guys like this would
have thought it was magic. An impossibility made manifest
by superhumans in the future. One of their fellow
explorers, Ernest Shakleton drew this place on the
back of a menu once. Dreaming of someday crossing
this whole continent, and paying a huge price to try. This is a place that has
lured explorers from all over, killing many of them. That's because the bottom
of the earth is a place that humans really shouldn't go. It's a place that in
fact, they couldn't go. (dramatic music) Hey, I'm super excited for you to see the rest of this video. First, I need to say
thank you to Storyblocks for sponsoring today's video. I actually used Storyblocks
to make this video. I didn't go to Antarctica for this video, I got a lot of this
footage from Storyblocks which is a giant repository
of loads of tools that you can use to make your own videos. From over a million 4K
and HD footage clips, animation templates, music, sound effects, images and more, I mean,
it's a lot of stuff. It's all searchable, it's all there. You can download as much as you want for one monthly subscription. I've been using Storyblocks
for literally a decade before they ever came to
sponsor me for a YouTube video, and it's kind of a
dream to work with them. Recently, Storyblocks changed the game by creating a plug-in for
After Effects and Premiere which are the programs we use to edit and animate our videos. What this means is you can
be inside of your editor and have access to all of this footage, so you're not like downloading it and moving it to a different folder, you're just grabbing it
from the Storyblocks panel inside of your software. It's truly amazing, and I just found out that all of this footage
that I shot from Switzerland and Greenland is actually
up on Storyblocks now. You can go and download
as much as you want of my beautiful images from these places in addition to hundreds of thousands of other amazing visuals. This is an incredible service that comes at a very affordable price. It's a set price, there's
not like hidden fees. You can download as much stuff as you want for this one set price, my huge fan. So thank you Storyblocks for
sponsoring today's video. There's a link in my description, it is storyblocks.com/johnnyharris. Clicking that link helps
support this channel but it also lets you learn more about how this service
can help you up your game as a visual storyteller, whether you are an individual creator or a big production company,
Storyblocks can help you. Let's get back to this
video about Antarctica. Our species were able to move and settle across the whole whole globe from desolate ice deserts to
impossibly far away islands. Somehow we just showed up, we settled. But even after we had reached
every corner of the globe thousands of years ago, there was still one land mass that no human had ever laid their eyes on, but something had to exist
down here they thought, something to balance out
all of the land in the north with land in the south. So explorers and map
makers continue to search, and on these maps they
drew their imaginary ideas. A giant continent somewhere down here, or maybe this island out in the east really extended down, like way down. Maybe there was palm trees and abundance, a new world yet to be discovered. Others mocked the idea
of a southern world. They depicted it as a dystopian land full of kingdoms rife with immorality. But these were all guesses. It all remained unknowable. Too far away to find out. (dramatic music) By the end of the 1700's, explorers had turned most
of the world's oceans from mysteries to fact. And it was only then that the vast ocean expanses of the south turned from imaginary musing into the next frontier of discovery. The newly enlightened map makers were now drawing precise grided lines to accurately audit the planet. They were done with their
pretend predictions, their monsters in place of knowledge. The map would remain empty until they had evidence to fill
in those great blank spaces. Hopefully with earth's
lost and last continent for thousands of years
conjectured by many, but seen by none. So expeditions were launched
moving south and they failed. The southern seas were simply too vast. The gaps in our knowledge too big to take on this uncharted place. But in 1772, one captain would
begin to change everything. (dramatic music) He set sail with two ships and 192 men, and with him the latest technology: a new clock, the most precise
clock ever made at the time and would for the first time allow him to determine his longitude,
to map his every move, to give us the lines that we
can now show you on this map. This journey was funded
by the all-consuming greed of an expanding empire, looking
for new soil to exploit. But him personally, he had big
things going on in his mind. He was in it for the desire to go south, further south than any man had ever gone and as far south as any
man could possibly go. He wanted to be the one
to find the lost continent at the bottom of our planet. So for three years, he scoured the oceans, yet searching in the temperate latitudes all he found was water. So he decided to cross a line that no one before him had
crossed, the Antarctic Circle. (dramatic music) In case it's not clear, we're now looking at
the bottom of the world. And this map is actually a story. It's a story of a doggedly
determined explorer, spending years of his life
circling these oceans, dipping more south than
any human had ever traveled then coming up and then dipping down again just in case this time
he might find something, but all he found was frozen water, floating ice, sharp and perilous, but he kept on looking for ways in. On a couple of occasions he reached within
breathing distance of land but he never caught sight of it. After years of searching it
was finally time to head home. He didn't find the continent, but what he did do was prove that if this fable land existed, it would not be the bountiful paradise that people had imagined and hoped for. He had scoured nearly every
inch of those latitudes. Instead, he knew that any land down here would be a desolate world, "Forever buried in snow and ice." So more explorers go and attempt to do what
Captain Cook couldn't and 45 years later they find something. It was the lost continent and humans were laying eyes
on it for the first time. No, it was not temperate,
but barren and merciless, but it was seen, it existed. For human beings, a moment like this doesn't
mean the end of a goal, it actually just means the very beginning. So they don't stop here, soon more ships are heading south, explorers looking to claim
land for their country, seal hunters, whale hunters looking for new untouched waters, scientists on boats with
measuring tools and open minds recording everything. The unknown place, a little more known, sketched on paper the
shape of a land mass. But these records only
served as a new measurement of our ignorance, how much we didn't know. Our discoveries were still
scattered and partial, accrued shape, a ghost
of something much bigger. To truly unveil Antarctica's mysteries, we needed to venture inside it. A few years would need to pass before the people with power would turn their attention slightly away from mapping and conquering
the non-icy world to supporting the full exploration
of this desolate place. But eventually they got on board. They needed to know what existed in the last blank land on the map. By then they had unleashed
the magic of mechanical power. Power that was fed by
carbon from ancient trees turned into black gold,
locked deep in the earth. This new power allowed them to navigate the once impossible ice,
unlocking the perilous interior. On board these boats were scientists, explorers ready to ask
and answer new questions, armed with new methods, new
tools, progress, discovery, adventure, and of course,
the French being French. Soon it's 1911 and there's a race to see who can get to the South Pole first. And it's the Norwegian group who does. The British team gets there second and everyone dies on their way back and the map is shaping up. New goals come to replace old ones, we now need to cross Antarctica
through the the pole, going through the ominous
unexplored region on the map. A guy named Shakleton tried this, but didn't make it very far. But his journey became a tale of courage and the will to live, when he and his crew against all odds in some of the most hostile circumstances managed to all return home. The expeditions of that
period reset the standards of human limits and bit
by bit, line by line, the void on the map was
gradually getting filled in. By 1920, you're seeing maps like this, a red shading on the parts that we know and yet still so much left unknown. After millennia of dreaming of it, we finally and indisputably
conquered the skies. We were now able to lay our
eyes on uncharted territories at an unprecedented scale. The first airplane flew
over the South Pole in 1928 and in the next decade,
many more would follow, each flight providing more detail to add to the compendium of
hard fought observations. But as much as it is a part
of our nature to explore and learn, it is also a part of our
nature to conquer and dominate. In the aftermath of the most
catastrophic war humanity had ever known, humans once again revealed
their little eternal paradox, that their love for exploration was often as much about
conquest and control as it was about learning
and understanding. Petty fights about who owned
this land came to the surface and thus on the maps, more and more we see
these shades of colors, unnaturally straight lines
that indicate who owns what. Scientific research stations
stopped the icy surface, flying national flags, established as much for
asserting territorial control as for science. And now it's a new world
where the two superpowers had turned the map into their
chess board for influence. Both were now looking for a share of what was still earth's
largest unexplored territory. And soon the United States
is making maps like this, that has a whole shade color dedicated to land that has been seen
exclusively by American eyes. It's a map that says we were here first, creating a paper trail
that they could point to just in case they needed to stake a claim here at the bottom of the planet. But then the countries get together and they make an agreement that Antarctica was not
meant to be just a new field for our conflicts, but rather a place for scientific inquiry. So scientists keep coming
enabled by better technology. Icebreakers and helicopters are
unloaded onto the continent. But despite all the progress, this continent remains unknown
and potentially unknowable. That's until humans break a
seemingly impossible barrier. By escaping the force of
gravity that kept us bound to our home planet, we're now throwing up spherical machines with cameras on them into space. Countries use these
satellites to snap photos of their enemies on giant roles of film and gold canisters, that would fill up and then be ejected back down into the sky intercepted by an airplane. And now, yes, we have photos
of what our enemy is up to, but look, we also just
have photos of the earth, seeing it like never before. (upbeat music) These terrestrial outlines
that old cartographers would tediously reconstruct with only the help of
scattered observations, math, and plenty of imagination, now readily available to
us, with perfect accuracy. Our maps were no longer educated guesses, they were snapshots of reality, thanks to our satellites
hurling around our planet once every a hundred or so minutes, taking photos and making
measurements while they fly. Humans have outdone themselves now. We have more data than our human brains could possibly comprehend. It's too much. It's basically worthless due to its scale, its detail, its complexity, until new electronic brains appear, allowing us to collect and
synthesize hundreds of thousands of images from space,
blending them into one map. (dramatic music) A map that explores who broke
into this desolate place a hundred years earlier
could have never imagined. Every nook and cranny
of Antarctica is seen. Every hill, every curve, every valley, every cliff, every ledge. But we don't stop there. Now let's measure the radiation emitted from the icy surface. We can measure the chemistry
of the atmosphere down here, the temperature of its oceans, the velocity of its ice
sheets as they move. We can somehow even map what this place would look like if you
removed all the ice. Ice, that let me remind you, is four kilometers thick in some places. Scientists soon declare that Antarctica, the place that was always
inaccessible to humans is now the best mapped continent on earth. This generation's long
quest to map Antarctica is ultimately a story of
struggle and then triumph. A story of exploration and science. And to me it's rock solid
proof of something that seems to be deeply embedded
into the human experience, the obsession to discover, regardless of the cost and despite the lack of any
rational reason to do so, always driven by these
twin motives of curiosity and conquest. Always willing to do whatever it takes to step foot in a place no
matter how impossible it seems. So yes, we've basically
entirely mapped Antarctica and the entire planet at that, but you know we're not gonna stop here. As new frontiers reveal
their mysteries to us, the same story is bound to unfold, and I can say with certainty
that we will continue to do this, not because
we need to for survival, but because we need to
for some other reason, some deeply human impulse that pushes us way past what's reasonable into the impossible, to expand the frontiers of our knowledge, to understand ourselves and our surroundings a little better, to discover the truths of
our world and our universe. (dramatic music) Hey everyone, thanks for watching. This was a new format, obviously, one I'm really excited about though because we poured a lot into making this beautiful and immersive, Tom and I developed this soundtrack in a very, very bespoke, tailor-made way. And my hope is that it really stuck. I know for me, this is one of my favorite
videos we've ever made. I wanna tell you about something because I'm very excited about this. I made a poster. It is a poster called All Maps Are Wrong, and it features dozens of map projections. We can't accurately map
the world on a 2D surface because the world is a sphere, right? And so we get all these
weird map projections. And they're beautiful to look at, they're kind of weird to look at. We just launched this right now, it's literally, this is the first time I'm talking about it to you right now. And what that means is
there is a presale discount. 15% off for this week only. Support the channel, we have lots in presets that
we use to color our videos and our photos, our
members of the newsroom are also a major pillar of our community. That's our Patreon. And they get access to an
extra video every month, a behind the scenes flog, as well as a bunch of other perks that you can check out over
on patreon.com/johnnyharris. I started a company called Bright Trip, that is all about smart travel
and smart travel products, video products. You might love that. And just being here, watching
these videos, commenting, showing your support really
actually helps in a big way. So thanks for being here. I'll see you in the next one. Bye everyone. - [Speaker] Okay, that is that. (dramatic music)
