Revealing the Mysteries Beneath Antarctica's Frozen Expanse
Beneath the vast, ice-covered landscape of Antarctica lies a realm that has long captured the imagination of explorers, scientists, and the general public alike. Beyond the towering glaciers and impenetrable sheets of ice that blanket the continent, a hidden world of wonder and intrigue awaits discovery. What secrets do the frozen depths conceal? What ancient geological formations and potential resources lie entombed within the icy grip of this remote and inhospitable land?
Through cutting-edge technology and persistent scientific exploration, researchers are slowly peeling back the icy veil to unveil the mysteries that have long eluded us. From subglacial lakes and vast underwater river systems to buried mountain ranges and traces of past life, Antarctica's frozen frontier harbors a trove of untold stories waiting to be revealed. Join us as we embark on a journey to uncover the hidden wonders that lie beneath Antarctica's frozen expanse, shedding light on the continent's past, present, and potential future.
This descriptive paragraph seeks to:
Build anticipation and intrigue around the hidden mysteries beneath Antarctica's ice
Highlight the key elements of discovery, exploration, and the unveiling of the unknown
Convey a sense of wonder, curiosity, and the potential for valuable scientific insights
Set the stage for a deeper dive into the subject matter and the revelations that await
The overall tone is one of excitement, exploration, and the thrill of uncovering the secrets of this remote and enigmatic continent. Let me know if you would like me to modify or expand on this description further.
Through cutting-edge technology and persistent scientific exploration, researchers are slowly peeling back the icy veil to unveil the mysteries that have long eluded us. From subglacial lakes and vast underwater river systems to buried mountain ranges and traces of past life, Antarctica's frozen frontier harbors a trove of untold stories waiting to be revealed. Join us as we embark on a journey to uncover the hidden wonders that lie beneath Antarctica's frozen expanse, shedding light on the continent's past, present, and potential future.
This descriptive paragraph seeks to:
Build anticipation and intrigue around the hidden mysteries beneath Antarctica's ice
Highlight the key elements of discovery, exploration, and the unveiling of the unknown
Convey a sense of wonder, curiosity, and the potential for valuable scientific insights
Set the stage for a deeper dive into the subject matter and the revelations that await
The overall tone is one of excitement, exploration, and the thrill of uncovering the secrets of this remote and enigmatic continent. Let me know if you would like me to modify or expand on this description further.
Transcript
00:00Antarctica is easily the least understood and the most mysterious of all Earth's continents in the 21st century.
00:06It's such a poorly understood place that most people alive today still don't even really have a solid grasp about Antarctica's true size or shape.
00:14Something that's probably not really helped by our perception of Antarctica as this sprawling misshapen blob that we always see stretching across the bottom of our two-dimensional maps.
00:23If it's even displayed on the map at all.
00:25In reality, Antarctica is the world's fifth largest continent.
00:28Exceeding the sizes of Australia and Europe and being closer in size to South America than any other continent.
00:34The true scale of Antarctica can be revealed when overlaying it atop a continent that we're more familiar with like North America.
00:40Antarctica is significantly larger than the mainland continental 48 US states.
00:45While the distance from the Antarctic Peninsula to the other side of the continent is as far as the Canadian Arctic Islands are to Mexico.
00:51And placed over Europe, Antarctica would stretch from the far northern reaches of Norway and Finland down to Iran and Iraq in the southeast and well past Ireland into the mid-Atlantic to the west.
01:02It's a genuinely massive place and it's also almost completely empty and absent from human life.
01:08The human population of Antarctica ranges from as many as 4,000 people during the warmer Antarctic summer months.
01:14To as few as only a thousand people during the long dark and savagely cold Antarctic winters.
01:20When the darkness of night envelops the entire continent for months straight and the temperatures plummet beneath negative 34 degrees Celsius continent wide.
01:29But it's not just the brutal weather of Antarctica that keeps its population low.
01:33It's also just an insanely remote place that's really difficult to get yourself to.
01:38It's located down at the bottom of the globe and the closest large human settlement to the continent is Ushuaia in far southern Argentina.
01:45Which is still about a thousand kilometers away from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
01:49Despite this closeness however, the distance between Ushuaia and Antarctica is separated by the infamous Drake Passage.
01:55An expanse of water that is perhaps the roughest and most dangerous part of the world's oceans.
02:00Here at the bottom of the civilizational world between the continents, the Southern and Pacific Oceans flow unobstructed into the Atlantic.
02:07Representing the only location in the Southern Hemisphere where winds and ocean currents can each flow around the entire world without any obstruction from land.
02:16Allowing them to violently whip around the world continually and keep picking up speed and strength as they go.
02:23This combined with a collision of warmer water in the North and colder water in the South.
02:27Result in powerful waves in the Drake Passage that can climb up to nearly 20 meters or 65 feet high during extreme weather scenarios.
02:36With the rough conditions through the Drake Passage and the vast distances between Antarctica and the other nearby continents of Africa and Australia.
02:43It's no wonder that human eyes most likely never even saw the frozen continent at all until the 19th century.
02:50When a Russian ship made the first ever recorded discovery of Antarctica in 1820.
02:54Even today more than two centuries later, we still understand precious little about this isolated continent.
03:01Especially anything about what's possibly beneath the Titanic Antarctic Ice Sheet.
03:06Ice covers more than 98% of the Antarctic continent's surface.
03:10Leaving very few exposed areas of land above the ice that we can actually observe with our own eyes.
03:15On average across the entire continent, the Antarctic Ice Sheet stretches more than two kilometers thick from the surface we can observe down to the surface of the actual continental landmass.
03:25But at its thickest points, the ice on Antarctica can reach upwards of nearly five kilometers thick.
03:31Which is nearly as thick as six of the Burj Khalifa's in Dubai, the world's tallest building, all stacked on top of each other.
03:38This is why 61% of all the freshwater on the planet is locked away in Antarctica's ice sheet.
03:44And if the entire thing melted away into its liquid form, it would probably end up raising global sea levels by around 60 meters.
03:51Which would be enormously catastrophic and result in the total obliteration of Florida and most of the US Gulf and East Coast.
03:59The ice sheet of Antarctica is so thick and impenetrable that it's widely accepted that we know more about the surface of faraway worlds like Mars today.
04:07Than what's actually beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet on the real surface of Antarctica.
04:12Rather than drilling through kilometers of ice to see what's beneath it.
04:15The primary way that we've been able to sort of visualize what's beneath the ice on the continent.
04:20Is by flying planes over it and shooting radio waves down into the ice below.
04:24And then analyzing how the waves echo back up to the plane.
04:28A process that's known as radio echo sounding.
04:30But the Antarctic continent is, of course, a much larger place than even Europe is.
04:35And so flying planes doing this technique over the entire continent would be a brutally painstaking expensive and time consuming process.
04:43So as it stands now, we only have a limited idea of what's beneath the frozen continent.
04:48Based on the few radio echo sounding flights we've actually done across it so far.
04:53And it's estimated that more than 90% of the continent beneath the ice remains unmapped and unknown.
04:59But the small amount of information we already do know about what's beneath the world's largest ice sheet on the world's most mysterious continent.
05:06Is already incredibly fascinating.
05:09For starters, we already know that Antarctica isn't really a unified landmass beneath the ice like it appears to us above the ice.
05:16Were all of the continent's ice sheet to melt or be removed, the Antarctic continent's true shape would be revealed to us.
05:23What we currently know as the Antarctic Peninsula, in reality, would emerge as a completely separate archipelago of mountainous islands.
05:29That has sometimes been referred to as lesser Antarctica.
05:32While most of the rest of the continent, known as greater Antarctica, would remain above the ocean's surface and be roughly the same size as Australia.
05:39Each of these two different halves of Antarctica, one archipelagic and one continental, would become this way because of their radically different geologies and histories.
05:48The area of greater Antarctica, or the eastern side of the continent, is known to consist of more ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks.
05:55While the more archipelagic lesser Antarctica is much younger and made up of sedimentary and volcanic rocks instead.
06:01Fascinatingly, lesser Antarctica belongs to the Great Pacific Ring of Fire.
06:06A continuous belt of tectonic fault lines and active volcanoes that spans nearly the entire perimeter of the Pacific Ocean.
06:13And which has existed for about the past 35 million years.
06:17As a result, most of the archipelagos and islands that exist in lesser Antarctica are volcanic in nature.
06:22Despite their appearances of frozen ice and glaciers atop of them.
06:26Mount Erebus, far to the east in Antarctica, is the highest active volcano on the continent and the southernmost active volcano on the planet.
06:33Complete with a lake of molten lava within its inner summit crater that has been observable since the 1970s and the last erupted only a few years ago in 2020.
06:43The average year-round temperature around where Mount Erebus is located remains around negative 17 degrees Celsius.
06:50And during the Antarctic winter months between April and September, the temperature will never climb above negative 20 Celsius.
06:56And it'll sink to as low as negative 62 degrees Celsius in August.
07:00Cold enough to cause frostbite to expose skin within minutes or to instantly freeze water.
07:06If you were to pour out a bowl of hot water in the air at these temperatures, it would turn to snow before it even hit the ground.
07:12This is an environment that is incredibly hostile to life where you wouldn't expect to find very much of it.
07:17And yet, just beneath the surface of Mount Erebus is an entire new world that we've only just started to come to understand.
07:25Decades and centuries worth of hot steam produced by the Mount Erebus volcano have carved out a network of tunnels through the ice beneath the mountain.
07:33Within these sub-volcanic ice caves, the temperatures are known to reach as high as 25 degrees Celsius or about 77 Fahrenheit.
07:41Warm enough for you or me to hang out down there in a t-shirt and shorts and be comfortable doing it despite being in the middle of Antarctica.
07:48And that means that the Antarctic sub-volcanic cave systems could be warm enough to host all kinds of life that we may not even be aware of yet.
07:57Back in 2017, a team led by the Australian National University acquired a sample of the soil within one of these cave systems beneath Mount Erebus.
08:04And after analyzing its composition, they discovered that the soil contained DNA traces of things like algae and mosses.
08:11But most tantalizing of all, DNA traces of small animals that might be living down there as well in a sub-Antarctic oasis of life.
08:19Most of these animal-related DNA traces they found were similar to species that we already know of living up on the surface.
08:25But not all of them.
08:27Some of the traces couldn't be linked to species we already know about, but were most closely related to anthropods.
08:33Species like shrimp, centipedes, or spiders.
08:36Meaning that there could be anthropod-like species down in these warm caves beneath Mount Erebus that remain unknown to mankind.
08:43And indeed, there are 15 other active or semi-active volcanoes located across Antarctica that could contain similar warm steam-carved tunnels and caves beneath them all as well.
08:53Meaning that there could be more than a dozen of these oasis-like ecosystems beneath the ice of Antarctica that we presently know virtually nothing about.
09:02Planes flying over Antarctica with radio echo sounding data have revealed a vast landscape beneath the ice of rolling valleys, riverbeds, and hills similar to the landscape seen elsewhere on Earth.
09:13Only frozen in time and locked beneath kilometers of ice.
09:17One of the most interesting geographic features on the continent that was only recently discovered in 2019, however, is what we now know is the deepest canyon anywhere on the Earth's land surface.
09:27A canyon that if it wasn't hidden by the ice above it, would put the Grand Canyon in America to shame.
09:32Within Greater Antarctica, beneath the Denman Glacier, exists the canyon that we now understand plummets to three and a half kilometers deep beneath the sea level.
09:42Which is just insanely deep.
09:44For reference, this canyon in Antarctica sinks to a depth that is roughly the same as the average depth of the Atlantic Ocean.
09:51And that's roughly half as deep as Mount Everest is tall.
09:55The deepest point below sea level on exposed land on the planet is the shoreline around the Dead Sea, between Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank.
10:02And it only sinks to as low as 413 meters beneath sea level.
10:07This canyon in Antarctica sinks nearly eight and a half times deeper than that.
10:12Only in the oceans do canyons dip deeper below the surface.
10:16And we didn't even know about this super deep canyon on Antarctica until 2019.
10:21Because it's been covered up by kilometers worth of ice for millions of years now.
10:26Imagine what looking out at this canyon would be like without all of the ice obscuring it.
10:31But the deepest canyon on the Earth is far from the only interesting geographic feature that the ice of the frozen continent has been hiding from us.
10:39In 1958, a team of Soviet researchers in Antarctica discovered a massive mountain range beneath the ice sheet that nobody knew about beforehand.
10:48That became known as the Gambertsev Mountain Range, named after the Soviet geophysicist Grigory Gambertsev.
10:54These mountains are roughly the same length and height as the Alps in Southern Europe are.
10:59Running for about 1,200 kilometers long, with peaks soaring up to as much as 2,700 meters high.
11:05They're also completely obscured from the surface because they are buried beneath more than 600 meters of ice and snow pack.
11:11And they're still far from the only interesting thing hidden beneath the ice of the continent.
11:16In the late 1950s and early 60s, researchers began detecting a large gravity anomaly in East Antarctica where the gravity present was weaker than what would be naturally expected.
11:27The anomaly spanned across a huge area beneath the Antarctic ice sheet that was about 243 kilometers wide and sunk down to a depth of about 848 meters.
11:36For decades, there were several hypotheses about what exactly could be causing this weaker gravity in the area of East Antarctica until in 2006.
11:44A team of researchers from Ohio State University using data from satellites owned by NASA and the German Aerospace Center managed to identify what they believed to be an ancient 480 kilometer wide meteorite impact crater that was buried beneath the ice sheet.
12:00But because of the area's extremely remote location and distance beneath several kilometers worth of solid ice,
12:06there's still to date have never been any direct samples taken from the area to actually test for this impact event hypothesis.
12:13And so, the idea that an asteroid could have impacted this area and caused a massive crater in Antarctica is still only a theory for now, but a highly likely theory nonetheless.
12:25If the gravity anomaly here turns out to indeed be a meteorite impact crater, it would be by far the largest one ever discovered in the world.
12:33With a width that's nearly three times as large as the Chisculub impact crater in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico,
12:39that is believed to have been formed by a 10 kilometer wide asteroid that struck the area roughly 66 million years ago and likely contributed to the annihilation of the dinosaurs.
12:48In order to create an impact crater nearly three times larger than that one in Antarctica,
12:52the asteroid that might have hit the area would have had to have been four to five times larger than the dinosaur killer asteroid was.
12:59So, roughly 40 to 50 kilometers wide.
13:02An asteroid that would have been big enough to stretch from Central Park in New York City all the way into Connecticut.
13:07Now, because of effects like erosion, impact craters on the Earth's surface gradually disappear over time.
13:13Because of this phenomenon, the Ohio State University researchers who concluded that the structure hidden beneath the Antarctic ice sheet was an impact crater,
13:20believe that it happened no more than 500 million years ago.
13:24And no less than 100 million years ago.
13:26Because the structure seems to also have been geographically disturbed by the rift valley in the area that only formed around 100 million years ago
13:34during the separation of Antarctica and Australia from the ancient Gondwana supercontinent.
13:39And that timeline between 100 and 500 million years ago is extremely interesting.
13:44Because it potentially lines up more or less with the greatest mass extinction event that ever happened in our planet's history.
13:52The Permian-Triassic extinction event that took place sometime around 251.9 million years ago.
13:59An apocalyptically traumatizing event that is also often referred to as the Great Dying.
14:04Something happened on our planet all that time ago that quickly annihilated 57% of all biological families that existed at the time.
14:13Including a wipeout of 81% of the Earth's marine species and 70% of the Earth's land-based vertebrate species.
14:20It is by far the biggest mass extinction event that ever took place on the planet.
14:24And we still don't have a precise explanation of what exactly happened that caused it.
14:29But it could just be that the deep and mysterious Antarctic Ice Sheet has been hiding the cause of the Great Dying from us this entire time.
14:37If indeed it turns out that the East Antarctic Gravity Anomaly is truly the biggest impact crater that we have ever discovered.
14:44And it's been even further hypothesized that if it really was an impact event that caused it,
14:48it could have been so massive and destructive that it directly contributed to the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent
14:54by severely weakening the crust at the location of impact.
14:58Which eventually led to the separation of that ancient continent between Antarctica, Australia, and India.
15:04Also hidden beneath the surface of the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet are around 675 liquid subglacial lakes
15:11that researchers have only started discovering since the 1990s.
15:15A little more than only three decades ago.
15:17Several of these liquid lakes have been discovered deeper than three kilometers beneath the surface of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
15:22And by far the largest of them discovered to date is the infamously mysterious Lake Vostok.
15:27Which was only discovered by a team of Russian researchers in the east of the continent in the early 1990s.
15:33And its discovery wasn't announced to the general public until it was published in the scientific journal Nature in 1996.
15:40It turns out that Lake Vostok is a massive body of liquid water that exists about four kilometers deep beneath the surface of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
15:48And by the volume of water contained within the lake, Lake Vostok is surprisingly the sixth largest known lake in the world.
15:55Containing an amount of water within it that is even greater than that of Lake Michigan in the United States.
16:01And we didn't even know about it at all until the same year that Tiger Woods made his professional debut at the PGA Tour.
16:08Interestingly, the liquid water contained within Lake Vostok is below freezing temperature.
16:13Maintaining an average of about negative three degrees Celsius or about 27 Fahrenheit.
16:18This is possible because it's believed that there's a geothermal vent beneath the lake's floor that's providing it with some heat.
16:24While the pressure from the four kilometers of thick ice above the lake reduces the ice's melting point.
16:29And provides the lake's water with insulation from the abominably cold temperatures above it.
16:34And while negative three degrees Celsius temperature water is too cold for most marine life we know of to survive.
16:40It's still warm enough for many other species we know of that have adapted to extremely cold environments to thrive in.
16:46Antarctic krill, ice fish, arctic cod and certain species of sea stars, sea urchins and mollusks that we already know of.
16:53Are capable of surviving in extremely cold sub-zero waters.
16:57So what mysterious life forms that we're presently unaware of could be existing down below in the depths of Lake Vostok.
17:03And the hundreds of other lakes dotted across Antarctica hidden beneath the ice sheet.
17:08Lake Vostok is a particularly interesting case.
17:11Because it's believed to have been completely sealed off from the rest of the outside world by the Antarctic ice sheet.
17:16For at least the past 15 million years.
17:19Meaning that if life exists within the lake.
17:22It has evolved in complete separation from everywhere else in the world for millions of years now.
17:29In 2012 a team of Russian researchers successfully carried out the first ever drilling from the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet.
17:36All the way down nearly four kilometers deep to the liquid surface of Lake Vostok.
17:41Where samples of the water were taken and carried back to the surface.
17:44However this initial drilling sample taken from the lake by the Russians has been widely criticized for not being properly sanitized.
17:51And as a result the data they took is known to be heavily contaminated.
17:55Subsequent analysis of the lake's water sample has revealed kerosene contamination.
17:59And outside bacteria contaminants that were present on the drill bit before it even reached the lake.
18:04255 previously known contaminant species of bacteria have been identified by researchers in the 2012 Russian ice samples since then.
18:12But they have also managed to identify at least one bacteria species from the sample.
18:16That is presently unknown and has no matches in any international databases.
18:21Which the team hopes is evidence for at least one unknown bacteria species that exists down there.
18:26The Russian team apparently drilled another second borehole down from the surface into Lake Vostok in 2015.
18:32That they claimed was cleaner and more properly sanitized that resulted in another one liter sample of Lake Vostok's water being acquired.
18:39But the results on that water to date have never been published or reported on.
18:43So it's unclear what if anything they may have found in it.
18:47Most researchers involved with Lake Vostok expect that if life actually does exist down there.
18:51It'll be limited to simple life forms like bacteria.
18:54Which might not really sound all that exciting or sexy.
18:57But it could carry with it significant implications for other simple life forms that might be existing elsewhere on other worlds in our own solar system.
19:05Deep in the liquid oceans we also know exist beneath kilometers of frozen ice on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn like Europa and Enceladus.
19:14But there might also just be the chance that there actually is more complex life existing down there in Lake Vostok than we might expect.
19:21In 2020 a study conducted by researchers Colby Gurra and Scott Rogers of Lake Vostok's accretion ice rather than the liquid water within the lake itself.
19:30Revealed additional unknown bacteria species and most fascinatingly of all.
19:35An rRNA sequence that was more than 97% similar to that of a species of rock codfish that is common along the Antarctic coastline.
19:44Representing the first scientific report of an unknown fish species that could possibly be existing down within Lake Vostok.
19:51It would be incredible to one day see a sea drone with a camera and light attached to it get deployed down into Lake Vostok to see more of what's actually down there.
20:00Because based on a similar event that happened just a few years ago in 2021 the results could indeed be wildly unexpected.
20:07In the final days of December in 2021 a team of scientists for New Zealand melted a small hole through a glacier in West Antarctica here at the Kamb ice stream.
20:17The team knew that a large cavern of liquid water existed about 500 meters beneath the glacier surface here.
20:24Carved out over time by a small flowing river beneath the ice.
20:28But when the team actually lowered a camera down into the hole they carved down into the liquid water filled cavern below.
20:35What they saw shocked everybody involved.
20:38They actually saw animals hundreds of them swimming around in the isolated cavern below.
20:44The team later identified these blurry orange blotches to be shrimp like marine crustaceans called amphipods.
20:50And here in this cold isolated cavern of water 500 meters beneath the ice and a whopping 500 kilometers away from the nearest sunlight.
20:59Locked in complete darkness were hundreds of these more complex life forms absolutely thriving.
21:05Practically nobody expected to find that much life down here.
21:09And so what implications does that 2021 discovery have for what unknown life may be existing within Lake Vostok.
21:16Or within any of the hundreds of other lakes locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet that we haven't ever seen.
21:21So far the area of the West Antarctic ice sheet spans across a vast area that is roughly the same size as Mexico.
21:29And yet to this date humanity has only managed to actually witness a fraction of the unknown world that exists beneath the ice here.
21:37A few dozen small boreholes dotted around the region that has exposed a disjointed area to us only about the size of a regulation basketball court.
21:46The world beyond that basketball court in an area that's the size of Mexico remains unobserved unknown and mysterious.
21:54And I deeply want to know more about it.
21:57And in addition to all the unknown life and geographic features that probably exists beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.
22:03There's also almost certainly a vast amount of undiscovered and completely untapped natural resources beneath the ice sheet.
22:11That humanity will likely begin to deeply covet one day soon as well.
22:16For decades it has been theorized that Antarctica is likely home to massive deposits of energy resources like oil and gas and coal.
22:23Owing to the fact that for hundreds of millions of years in the past the continent was not frozen and existed in a warmer part of the world.
22:30That likely contained eons worth of animal and plant life.
22:34It was only around 35 million years ago that Antarctica drifted far enough south to begin acquiring its ice sheet.
22:40And for hundreds of millions of years before that it never had any.
22:44Allowing plenty of time for complex life to evolve and die and gradually transform into hydrocarbons like petroleum over the eons.
22:52But it wasn't until just a few months ago before this video was published in May of 2024.
22:57That we had any idea of the actual potential extent of these Antarctic oil and gas reserves.
23:02Early that month evidence presented to the UK Parliament in London.
23:06Revealed that a Russian research ship operating in the Weddell Sea region between the Antarctic Peninsula in the west and greater Antarctica in the east.
23:14Discovered a truly gargantuan oil field there estimated to contain a deposit of approximately 511 billion barrels.
23:23Which is an absolutely absurd amount of oil.
23:27For reference the oil contained within this one Antarctic superfield is roughly double the amount of oil reserves controlled by Saudi Arabia.
23:35Or put another way the oil in this Antarctic superfield is roughly 10 times the amount of oil that the entire North Sea has collectively produced over the past 50 years.
23:45British members of Parliament cautioned in 2024 that the Russian discovery here could become a prelude to countries or companies hauling in their offshore drilling platforms to exploit the field.
23:56And most alarmingly of all the discovery was made directly in the epicenter of the most widely disputed part of the frozen continent.
24:03That is simultaneously claimed by the United Kingdom in Argentina and partially by Chile as well.
24:09But for now straight-up drilling for oil in the Weddell Sea here is illegal under international law because of something known as the Antarctic Treaty.
24:17An international treaty that has its origins in the mid 20th century.
24:21You see up until the late 1950s Antarctica was theoretically a free-for-all land open to exploitation settlement and colonization from anyone brave enough to try it.
24:30It was simply the continent's extremely remote location and extremely hostile environment that kept most people from ever trying.
24:37But not everyone.
24:39Seven countries officially staked out their own territorial claims to Antarctic territory during the early 20th century.
24:45Including New Zealand, Australia, France and Norway and the sharply competing overlapping claims of the United Kingdom, Argentina and Chile.
24:52All of these countries territorial claims in Antarctica were based on their pre-existing legal claims or control of territory nearby to Antarctica.
25:00Such as New Zealand's and Australia's home territories, France's relatively nearby Crozet and Kerguelen Islands and Norway's Bouvet Island.
25:08Similarly the UK's claimed territory in Antarctica largely came out of an extension of their claims to the Falkland Islands.
25:15Along with South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands nearby.
25:18While Argentina's almost identical overlapping claim to Antarctica was based not only on their own territorial mainland.
25:24But also on their identical competing claims to the same islands claimed by Britain.
25:29The Falklands along with South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
25:32While Chile's territorial claims were also based on the proximity of their mainland territory.
25:38The territorial disputes on Antarctica itself between the UK, Argentina and Chile.
25:42And between Argentina and the UK over all of these other islands was heating up in the mid 20th century.
25:47And risked escalating into violence.
25:49And so within the context of the greater cold war that was going on between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time.
25:55A group of 12 countries got together in 1959 and signed the Antarctic Treaty.
25:59Which primarily sought to figuratively freeze the Antarctic continent in a sort of stasis just as it was.
26:04And prevent the use of the continent for any military purposes while preserving it for scientific research and access.
26:10Military operations on Antarctica were agreed by everyone to be severely restricted.
26:14Nuclear tests and detonations as well as dumping of nuclear waste on Antarctica were all agreed to be banned.
26:19And a powerful independent monitoring system was put into place.
26:23That enabled any country to inspect any other country's facilities on the continent without warning.
26:27To make sure they were actually abiding by all of the terms of the treaty.
26:30Antarctica as defined by the treaty consists of all the land, ice, islands and ocean below the 60 degrees of latitude line.
26:37The 7 countries who had already made territorial claims to Antarctica before the treaty was signed.
26:42Had their claims frozen and they became legally unenforceable.
26:45The US and the Soviet Union and later Russia.
26:47Reserved themselves the right to stake out their own territorial claims to Antarctica at some undetermined point in the future.
26:53While any country from around the world was eligible to join the treaty.
26:56And establish research bases on the continent wherever they deemed fit.
26:59Regardless of any other country's territorial claims.
27:02And perhaps most importantly the treaty explicitly forbids the harvesting of any of Antarctica's potential resources.
27:09Or even prospecting for the continent's potential resources.
27:12No mining or drilling for resources on Antarctica have been allowed ever since.
27:17As a result up to the present day in 2024.
27:20There are dozens of active research stations and bases dotted all across the Antarctic continent.
27:24That belong to no less than 55 different countries from all around the world.
27:28Many of them being within the zones of the continent's territory that's theoretically claimed by other countries.
27:33The United States runs by far the biggest base on the continent at McMurdo.
27:37Within the part of the continent that's claimed by New Zealand.
27:40During the warmer summer months McMurdo can host up to 1,500 residents.
27:44Which is also about a third of the entire human population that's on Antarctica during those months.
27:50The U.S. also runs the Amundsen Scott Research Station at the geographical South Pole.
27:55And while the dozens of other countries bases are located all across the rest of the continent.
27:59Most of them are heavily concentrated in the relatively warmer Antarctic Peninsula.
28:03That stretches up towards the southern tip of South America.
28:06Argentina and Chile however.
28:08As the two countries that are geographically the closest ones to Antarctica.
28:12Have put much more effort than any of the others.
28:14Into actually solidifying their territorial claims to the continent.
28:18They are the only two countries who have so far gone to the lengths.
28:21Of actually establishing permanent civilian settlements on the frozen continent.
28:26The Argentinians at Esperanza base on the Antarctic Peninsula.
28:29And the Chileans nearby the peninsula on King George Island with their Villa Las Estrellas.
28:34The populations of each of these settlements only ranges from a few dozen in the winters.
28:38To only a little more than a hundred in the summers.
28:41Which is interestingly roughly equal to the population of the first permanent colony.
28:45That the English established in America at Roanoke back in the 16th century.
28:49In the 1970s and 80s the Argentinian and Chilean governments.
28:53Both began sending pregnant women to their settlements in Antarctica.
28:56So that they would give birth to Argentinian and Chilean citizens on Antarctic soil.
29:01And therefore strengthen their national claims to the territories of Antarctica.
29:04That they claimed sovereignty over.
29:06This culminated with the first human being ever born on the Antarctic continent.
29:10With Emilio Marcos Palma on the 7th of January 1978.
29:15Who's been followed by at least 10 additional Argentinian and Chilean children since then.
29:19Since that time Argentina and Chile have even built up schools.
29:23And their permanent settlements on Antarctica.
29:25The children are currently busy attending right now.
29:28And remember that in addition to disputing territory in Antarctica.
29:31Argentina and the United Kingdom also more bitterly dispute.
29:35The sovereignty of the nearby Falkland Islands.
29:37Along with South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands as well.
29:40This dispute has historically been far more controversial.
29:44Than their disputed claims in Antarctica.
29:46Because unlike Antarctica thousands of people actually live here.
29:50The Falklands are presently controlled by the UK.
29:52And have a population of about 3600 British citizens.
29:56Which is gigantic compared to the population of settlements in Antarctica.
30:00The UK has nearly continuously administered the Falkland Islands.
30:04For nearly two centuries since the 1830s.
30:07But for various historical and geographic reasons.
30:10Argentina has heavily disputed Britain's control of them.
30:13For the two centuries ever since.
30:15The dispute infamously came to a climax in 1982.
30:18When Argentina unexpectedly launched a full scale amphibious invasion of the Falklands.
30:23Along with South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
30:25Which sparked a 10 week long war between Argentina and the UK.
30:29Around the islands that killed nearly a thousand soldiers.
30:32And wounded more than 2000 others.
30:34With major naval losses suffered on both sides.
30:37Argentina's invasion of the islands ended up being decisively defeated by the British.
30:42The islands have remained within the UK ever since.
30:45And the dispute over the Falklands between them while continuing.
30:48Has largely moved away into the very far background of geopolitics.
30:52That is rarely brought up today in the context of much larger disputes.
30:55Going on in Ukraine and the Middle East.
30:57But with that recent Russian made discovery.
31:00Of 511 billion barrels of oil down there.
31:03In the middle of both of their claims in Antarctica.
31:05The Falklands question could be brought back to the forefront.
31:08For both London and Buenos Aires sooner rather than later.
31:11With the current market price for a barrel of Brent crude oil.
31:14Being $86.70 when I wrote this video on the 3rd of July 2024.
31:19Those 511 billion barrels of oil in the Weddell Sea.
31:23Could theoretically be worth something to the tune of $44 trillion.
31:28Almost double the entire GDP of the United States.
31:32If a country or a corporation could control this Antarctic oil field.
31:35And didn't give a damn about international law and the Antarctic treaty system.
31:39They could literally manage to eclipse even Saudi Arabia.
31:43As the world's mightiest oil power.
31:45And completely transform their entire civilization in the process.
31:49Which is a whole hell of an incentive to actually do it.
31:52The only thing standing in the way right now from anybody doing that.
31:56On paper is the Antarctic treaty system.
31:59That strictly forbids anyone from harvesting Antarctica's resources.
32:02Beneath the 60 degree latitude line.
32:04But that treaty is actually up for review in only 24 years from now in 2048.
32:10And any country involved with the treaty is legally able to walk away from it.
32:14And withdraw whenever they want to.
32:16Right now the 511 billion barrels of oil that the Russians apparently discovered here.
32:21Are better to think of as deposits rather than as reserves.
32:25Since nobody can legally access them.
32:27But when the Antarctic treaty comes up for review in 2048.
32:30Argentina, the UK, Chile and maybe even other outside powers.
32:34Will become heavily motivated.
32:36To begin allowing drilling and mining to take place in Antarctica.
32:39If they stand to gain trillions of dollars by doing so.
32:43The ice cover in the Weddell Sea where the oil field was discovered.
32:46Is thinning out with climate change.
32:48And is increasingly becoming easier to access by ship or offshore oil rig.
32:52While the Antarctic Peninsula to the west.
32:54Protects the sea a bit from the often violent oceanic swell.
32:57That swirls around the continent above it.
32:59Nonetheless, Antarctica and the Weddell Sea.
33:02Is still a very difficult place to actually work in for now.
33:06The location is extremely remote.
33:08And thousands of kilometers away from civilizational centers in Argentina or South Africa.
33:12While icebergs and ice flows within the sea.
33:14Can still pose a grave challenge to the stability and safety of offshore oil platforms.
33:19Extracting the oil deposit here.
33:21Will undoubtedly be a prohibitively expensive venture to try and undertake.
33:25Which means that for now.
33:27Even if a country like Russia didn't really care.
33:29About violating international law by extracting the oil.
33:32They'd still have to deal with the cold financial calculus being against them.
33:36That simply makes extracting the oil not very economically feasible.
33:39But again in the not too distant future.
33:42As the ice cover in the Weddell Sea thins out with climate change.
33:45And as the Antarctic Treaty officially comes up for review in 2048.
33:49Some states may be open to trying out their shot.
33:52And if Argentina can actually finally get its economic act together over the next couple of decades.
33:57They might also become interested in challenging the United Kingdom.
34:00Over the status of the Falkland Islands again.
34:03It is the UK's control over the Falklands.
34:05Along with the uninhabited South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
34:08That forms the legal basis for the UK's territorial claim in Antarctica nearby.
34:13That overlaps directly with the Argentinian's claim.
34:16And with the gigantic Russian discovered oil field.
34:19Hypothetically if and it's a huge if.
34:22Argentina were to somehow miraculously become capable of pushing the British out of the Falklands.
34:28Then Argentina would greatly weaken the British claim in Antarctica that overlaps their own.
34:33And they would greatly strengthen their own claim to the gigantic oil field.
34:37Which could allow the country to radically transform itself.
34:40The same way that Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates did.
34:43After the Antarctic Treaty comes up for review in 2048.
34:46By allowing themselves to actually begin extracting some to even all of that oil.
34:51And at the same time the UK will be well aware of this potential challenge in the coming decades.
34:57That Argentina and potentially other nations like Russia could mount against them in the area.
35:01And so they will also be heavily incentivized to maintain their control over the Falklands.
35:05South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands at all costs.
35:09To maintain their own claim in Antarctica and to the giant oil field as well.
35:13For whoever maintains control over the field after 2048.
35:16Could potentially become the world's next Saudi Arabia.
35:20And for that reason the future of the Antarctic continent is a deeply uncertain one.