Speaker 1: I want you to do something for me. Wherever you
are right now, in the car, at the gym, maybe
just sitting at home. I want you to try and
transport yourself somewhere else. Close your eyes. If you can
do it safely, of course, Imagine you're standing in a
place where the sun has not shone for oh maybe
fifteen million years.
Speaker 2: That's a long time.
Speaker 1: It's absolute total darkness, the kind of darkness that feels heavy.
The temperature is stable, but it's hovering just below freezing.
And here's the real kicker. Directly above your head is
three kilometers of solid ice.
Speaker 2: It's an incredibly claustrophobic thought. You're describing a place that,
by all rights should be completely sterile. I mean as
sterile as the surface of.
Speaker 1: The moon exactly. The pressure is insane, right, It's like
being at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. You
think it's a tomb, a geological coffin where nothing moves,
nothing changes.
Speaker 2: Static, frozen world.
Speaker 1: But here's the hook, and this is the thread that
kept me pulling as I was going through the research
last night. It's not dead. If you were to flick
on a flashlight in that crushing silent darkness. You might
see something swim past you, a little translucent things, any
amphipods like shrimp, or you might find microbes that are
literally eating the rock itself to survive.
Speaker 2: And that's just the biology of it. If your eyes
could somehow see through the dark, you might see well,
you might see entire rivers flowing uphill.
Speaker 1: Uphill, or feel the ground shaking from the heat of
active volcanoes hidden right under your feet.
Speaker 2: That's the real Antarctica.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today we
are pulling on a thread that leads us to the
very very bottom of the world. We are talking about Antarctica.
But and this is the important part, not the Antarctica
you see on a map, not.
Speaker 2: That you know that white static blob at the bottom
of the globe.
Speaker 1: No, we are talking about the hidden continent, the Antarctica
that exists beneath all that ice.
Speaker 2: And as we've sifted through i mean a pretty big
stack of research for this. We're talking reports from glaciologists, geophysicist,
ice core scientists, it becomes really really clear that the
ice is just it's just the rapper on the gift.
Speaker 1: It's a rapper hiding a land mass bigger than the
United States in Mexico put together, and it's hiding secrets
that range from the biological origins of life on Earth
to a geopolitical ticking clock that is set to go
off in the year twenty forty eight.
Speaker 2: That twenty forty eight date is just it's the elephant
in the room for anyone who studies the polls. We
talk a lot about climate tipping points, but there's a
political tipping point coming that could fundamentally change who owns
the bottom of the world.
Speaker 1: And we're absolutely going to get to that political thriller
at the end. Trust me, you are going to want
to stick around for it because the moves that countries
like Russia and China are making right now, well let's
just say they are not just for the sake of
pure science, not at all. But before we get there,
we first have to understand what is actually down there,
because the physical reality of Antarctica is I think stranger
than any science fiction novel I've ever read.
Speaker 2: Oh it really is. And to understand that hidden continent,
you have to first understand the barrier that's covering it.
You have to understand the ice itself.
Speaker 1: So let's start there. Let's talk about the ice library.
When I was reading about the ice corese I was
just struck by this idea that we're not just talking
about frozen water here. We are talking about a form
of data storage.
Speaker 2: That is absolutely the best way to think about it.
It's a hard drive. Think about how snow falls in Antarctica.
It's the driest continent on Earth. It's technically a desert.
So the snow that falls it just never melts, It.
Speaker 1: Just piles up.
Speaker 2: It accumulates year after year, decade after decade. You get
another layer, a bit.
Speaker 1: Like tree rings, but made of snow.
Speaker 2: Exactly like tree rings. But the real magic, the part
that's so crucial for science, happens in the transition. As
the weight of the new snow piles up, it compresses
all the old snow underneath it. It goes from being
fluffy snowflakes to something called fern, which is sort of
granular like packed sugar. Okay, and then under immense pressure
it centers into solid glacial ice. But here's the critical part.
As a compresses, it traps tiny tiny bubbles of air.
Speaker 1: And this is the part that just blew my mind.
We're not talking about a chemical signature of the air
or a proxy. We're talking about actual physical pockets of
the ancient atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Correct. They are microscopic time capsules. So if you drill
a core and you pull it up from say a
kilometer down, you are holding in your hands the air
that was breathed by mammoth and saber toothed cats.
Speaker 1: You can actually release it.
Speaker 2: You can crack that ice open in a vacuum chamber
in a lab, and you're releasing the specific, real mix
of nitrogen, oxygen, CO two, methane, whatever was in the
atmosphere fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, even a million years ago.
Speaker 1: And we've gone back that far. The report's mentioned core
going back over a.
Speaker 2: Million years, the Epic Core, the European project for ice
coring in Antarctica. It's given us a continuous, beautiful record
for about eight hundred thousand years, and we have some
fragmented records pushing back even further toward one point two
million years.
Speaker 1: So it's a complete atmospheric archive.
Speaker 2: The most complet we have this is how we know
for an absolute fact how unprecedented our current CO two
levels are. We're not guessing. We can literally measure the
air from past interglacial periods and compare it to the
air outside the lab today, and you.
Speaker 1: Just can't get that anywhere else. Rocks don't give you this.
Speaker 2: No, rocks give you proxies, you know, isotopes that might
hint at temperature or ocean chemistry. The ice, the ice
gives you the source code. It gives you the actual atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: It also records other things too, like volcanic events. If
a massive volcano like Toba erupted in Indonesia seventy thousand
years ago, the ash travels through the stratosphere, it settles
all over the globe, including Antarctica, and gets buried. We
can find that specific dark layer in the ice core.
It's a perfect.
Speaker 1: Timeline, a timeline written in dustin air. But there's a
tragedy inherent in this library, isn't there? I mean the
Library of Alexandria burned down. This library it melts.
Speaker 2: That is the terrible fragility of the cryosphere. We are
in a frantic race to read these book before the
library essentially floods. As the planet warms, the surface starts
to melt. Even in Antarctica. That water percolates down into.
Speaker 1: The firm mess the layers.
Speaker 2: It corrupts the data, It mixes the air bubbles from
different years. The pristine record is lost forever. It's like
smearing the ink on the page.
Speaker 1: Speaking of reading the ice, I want to talk about
blue ice because visually this is just stunning. I was
looking at photo as well as prepping, and it looks
like something from another planet is glowing electric blue.
Speaker 2: It is otherworldly, and it happens in a very specific
areas where these things called catabatic winds. These are brutally cold,
dense winds that are literally falling off the high plateau
due to gravity. Are so ferocious that they scour away
all the fresh.
Speaker 1: Snow, so they're like a giant sander, a.
Speaker 2: Continental scale sander. They strip away hundreds thousands of years
of the surface layers until the deep ancient compressed ice
is exposed.
Speaker 1: And the reason it's so blue is because it's just
that dense.
Speaker 2: Exactly all the air has been squeak out, or the
bubbles are so small that the ice crystal structure itself
starts to absorb the red and yellow end of the
light spectrum. The only color that can escape back to
your eye is that deep, vibrant blue.
Speaker 1: And for scientists this must be like a gift.
Speaker 2: It's a massive shortcut. Instead of having to fund a
billion dollar project to drill down three kilometers to find
really old ice, you can just go to one of
these blue ice areas where geological forces have pushed that
ancient ice to the surface. You can literally walk across
the Pleistocene era.
Speaker 1: You can walk on history. But the ice, it also
takes things. It's not just a passive record. We have
to talk about Flight nine O one this story. It's
just so heavy, but it really illustrates that the ice
isn't a static surface, it's a living, moving river.
Speaker 2: The Mount Arabis disaster. It was November nineteen seventy nine
an Air New Zealand flight a DC ten. It was
a sight seeing flight. They'd fly from Auckland, do a
low sweep over McMurdo Sound to give the tourists an
incredible view of the continent and then fly back the
same day.
Speaker 1: And something horribly wrong.
Speaker 2: They flew directly into the side of the volcano Mount Erebus.
It was a tragic combination of a navigation coordinate error
that was entered incorrectly and a terrifying weather phenomenon called
sector whiteout.
Speaker 1: White out. I've heard that, but what is sector white out?
Speaker 2: It's crucial to understanding the dangers down there in Antarctica.
The diffuse light from an overcast sky can bounce between
the flat snow on the ground and the cloud layer
above in a way that completely erases all shadows. You
lose all sense of depth perception. The horizon just disappears.
Speaker 1: You can be looking directly at a mountain and not
see it.
Speaker 2: Your brain interprets it as just more flat, white terrain.
The pilots thought they were flying over the flat sea
ice of McMurdo Sound. In reality, they were flying straight
toward a twelve thousand foot volcano.
Speaker 1: That is utterly terrifying the idea that you think you're
flying over a flat plane and then impact.
Speaker 2: All two hundred and fifty seven people on board died instantly,
and because the crash light was on the lower sloops
of an active volcano and one of the most hostile
places on Earth, the recovery effort was just incredibly difficult.
They recovered some of the victims, but the wreckage the
ice cleaned it, and the.
Speaker 1: Report mentioned that because the ice on a volcano is
a flowing glacier, the wreckage has actually moved over the years.
Speaker 2: That's right. It's not a stationary tomb. The ice flows
downhill very slowly toward the ocean, So over the last
forty five years the ice has entombed and carried the
debris field. It is slowly transporting the remains of Flight
nine oh one toward the Ross ice shelf.
Speaker 1: So one day it could just calve off into an iceberg.
Speaker 2: In a few more decades, It's very possible. It's just
a very somber, powerful reminder that the continent is completely
indifferent to us. It preserves the past, but it also
consumes it.
Speaker 1: And different is the perfect word. It doesn't care if
you're a microbe or a Boeing DC ten. Now you
mentioned Mount Erebis, which is the perfect transition to the
next layer of this whole thing, the.
Speaker 2: Fire, the fire and ice paradox.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think most people, myself included before this, assume
Antarctica is just a frozen dead rock, but it's actually
incredibly geologically active.
Speaker 2: It's a tail of two very different continents. Really, you
have East Antarctica which is what we call a Cretan.
It's a massive, ancient, stable shield of rock, very thick crust,
very stable ice. That's the high cold plateau.
Speaker 1: Okay, the stable one.
Speaker 2: But then you have West Antarctica, the problem child, the
unstable younger sibling. Absolutely, West Antarctica isn't a single land mass.
It's actually an archipelago of volcanic islands that are just
covered and glued together by the ice sheet. And this
is critical. Much of its bedrock sits far below sea.
Speaker 1: Level, and it's hotter underneath.
Speaker 2: The crust is thinner. It's part of a rift system
like the East African Rift Valley. This means the Earth's
hot mantle is much closer to the surface, so.
Speaker 1: You have all this heat coming up from below, a
lot of it.
Speaker 2: Using ice penetrating radar, we have now identified one hundred
and thirty eight volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet alone.
Some are dormant, but a number of them are confirmed
to be active.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just unpa the physics of that for a second.
If a volcano erupts under two miles of solid ice,
it's not like Mount Saint Helen's, right, We don't see
a mushroom cloud of ash.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. The sheer pressure of the ice
cap suppresses any kind of explosive eruption, but the heat transfer,
what we call the thermal flux, is massive. It melts
the base of the ice sheet from below.
Speaker 1: And this is where that lubricant idea from the reports
comes in exactly.
Speaker 2: Ice is incredibly heavy, but it's held in place against
the bedrock by friction. But if you introduce a layer
of liquid water between the ice and the rock, you
lose that friction. The glacier suddenly has nothing to hold onto.
Speaker 1: It starts to slide, it speeds up.
Speaker 2: So these hidden volcanoes are essentially greasing the skids for
the glaciers to slide faster into the ocean.
Speaker 1: So it's not just warm ocean water eating the edges
of the glaciers, which we hear about a.
Speaker 2: Lot, right, it's also geothermal heat attacking the underbelly. It
makes predicting future sea level rise incredibly difficult because we
just don't have a per map of how much heat
is coming up in every single location. It's a huge variable.
Speaker 1: But at Mount Arabis we can see it. This is
the one place where the fire actually meets the sky.
Speaker 2: Arabis is the southernmost active volcano on Earth. It's famous
for having a permanent lava lake in its summit crater,
which is incredibly rare anywhere in the world. But the
really fascinating part for me is the ice towers, the
femur rolls.
Speaker 1: These are the steam vents coming off the side.
Speaker 2: Yes, hot volcanic gases, steam, carbon dioxide, sulfur are constantly
escaping from cracks on the flanks of the mountain. Now
it might be minus thirty or minus forty celsius outside,
but this steam is hot, so it freezes instantly the
second it hits the frigid air. It freezes, building up
these incredible hollow towers of ice around the vents. They
can be tens of meters high, like giant icy chimneys.
Speaker 1: And inside these chimneys it's warm.
Speaker 2: Inside. The constant flow of hot steam carves out these
complex cave systems, and within those caves the temperature can
be a balmy twenty five degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: That's seventy seven degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2: You could be comfortable in a t shirt.
Speaker 1: In an ortica. Inside an ice cave on the side
of an active volcano. That's just yeah, it's a ridiculous sentence.
Speaker 2: It is. And because it's warm and wet and there
are nutrients from the volcanic gas, life has moved in.
Scientists have explored these caves and found thriving communities of mosses, algae,
and bacteria.
Speaker 1: And are they just regular mosses?
Speaker 2: That's the amazing part. When they sequence the DNA from
soil samples, they found that some of these organisms, these
tiny invertebrates and microbes, have DNA sequences that don't match
anything else seen on Earth before.
Speaker 1: So they've evolved in isolation inside these little volcanic hot pockets,
it seems.
Speaker 2: So it's like a collection of piny, warm biological safehouses
in the middle of the most hostile environment on the planet.
Speaker 1: It really raises a profound question. I mean, during the
massive ice ages, when much of the planet was covered
in ice, did life survive in these little geothermal refuge?
Was this the Noah's Ark for microbes?
Speaker 2: It's a very compelling theory, and that water isn't just
in these steam vents. This leads us to the continent's
entire plumbing system. I think this was the single biggest
shock for me in the reading. I just assume the
bottom of the ice sheet was frozen solid to the rock.
But it's wet.
Speaker 1: It's a wetland, continent sized subglacial wetland.
Speaker 2: A very dark, very cold wetland.
Speaker 1: So explain how that works. Why is water liquid if
the temperature is say minus two degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: Two reasons working together. First, that geothermal heat we just
talked about is constantly warming the base. Second, and just
as important is pressure. Right we all learn in high
school chemistry that water freezes at zero degrees celsius. But
that's at normal sea level atmospheric pressure. If you put
water under three hundred atmospheres of pressure, which is roughly
what you get under three kilometers of ice, the melting
point actually drops.
Speaker 1: So the ice acts like an insulating blanket, trapping the
Earth's heat, and the immense pressure keeps the water in
a liquid state.
Speaker 2: Exactly. So you have this interface, the subglacial bed, which
is this slushy, wet, dynamic environment.
Speaker 1: And it's not just a swampy mess. It's organized. The
report said, we've mapped over four hundred subglacial.
Speaker 2: Lakes over four hundred counting, and they're not isolated ponds.
They are all connected by a vast network of rivers
and streams, a massive hidden drainage system.
Speaker 1: And this is where things get really weird. These rivers
can flow uphill.
Speaker 2: They can because gravity isn't the only force at play
down there. The system is driven by pressure gradients. If
the ice sheet is thicker and heavier in one spot,
it squeezes the water underneath with more force, pushing it
towards an area where the ice is thinner and lighter,
even if that means going up a physical slope.
Speaker 1: So the water is literally being pumped around by the
shifting weight of the entire continent precisely.
Speaker 2: And the volumes of water we're talking about are staggering.
We have satellite data from missions like IAT that can
measure the height of the ice surface to within a
few centimeters, and we've seen areas of the eye she
suddenly sink by ten meters in the space of a
few weeks, and.
Speaker 1: That means a lake underneath just drained.
Speaker 2: It means billions of gallons of water just rushed through
a dark, hidden tunnel to the next lake down the shane.
Maybe hundreds of kilometers away. The whole continent is sort
of breathing. It rises and falls as these lakes fill
and drain.
Speaker 1: It's like a giant, slow motion hydraulic machine. But there's
a leak in this system, isn't there? We have to
talk about.
Speaker 2: Blood falls the tailor glacier.
Speaker 1: If you're near a computer, you have to google this
blood falls Antarctica. It looks like something out of a
horror movie. It's this pristine white glacier face and pouring
out of a crack in the ice is this vivid,
blood red liquid that stains the ice all the way
down to the sea.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible sight. It was first discovered back in
nineteen eleven by a geologist named Griffith Taylor, and for
decades the logical assumption was, oh, it must be some
kind of red algae. That's the usual explanation for red
colored snow or ice.
Speaker 1: But it's not algae.
Speaker 2: It's not by all algy it's chemistry. It's rust rust.
What's pouring out is an ancient hypersaline brine. It's water
that's at least twice as salty as the ocean, and
it's been trapped in a pocket under the Tailor glacier
for at least a million years, maybe as many as five.
Speaker 1: Million, completely isolated from the rest.
Speaker 2: Of the world, no light and crucially no oxygen. And
for all those millions of years, it's been sitting there
reacting with the iron rich bedrock, dissolving that iron into
the water. So you have this clear, salty, iron rich
water trapped in the.
Speaker 1: Dark, and then it finally reaches the edge of the
glacier and.
Speaker 2: Hits the air and boom oxidation. It's an instant chemical reaction.
The dissolved ferrous iron reacts with the oxygen in the
atmosphere and instantly rusts, turning that clear water into the
deep red color you see.
Speaker 1: But the biology here is the really mind bending part,
because there are things living in that dark, salty, oxygen
free brine.
Speaker 2: This is where it starts to feel like we're talking
about another planet. Inside that water, microbes are thriving, but
they can't perform photosynthesis because there's no light. They can't
breathe oxygen because there isn't.
Speaker 1: Any So what are they eating? What are they breathing?
Speaker 2: They're breathing iron. They're using a bizarre metabolic pathway involving
sulfate and the ferrous iron in the water to metabolize
tiny traces of ancient organic matter that we're trapped with
the millions of years ago.
Speaker 1: They're rock eaters in a way.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's proof that a complex ecosystem can sustain itself
in a completely sealed system with no input from the
sun or the atmosphere for millions of years.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just some scientific curiosity. This has a
global impact. This gets to the iron pop concept right.
Speaker 2: Yes, Blood Falls is a small, visually dramatic example of
a much larger process. We now believe that this iron
rich subglacial water is seeping out from underglaciers all around
the continent into the Southern Ocean.
Speaker 1: And the Southern Ocean is starved for iron exactly.
Speaker 2: It's what we call a high nutrient, low chlorophyll region.
It has plenty of other nutrients like nitrates and phosphates,
but it lacks iron. Iron is the limiting factor for life.
Speaker 1: So the glaciers are literally fertilizing the ocean.
Speaker 2: You can think of it that way, Yes, Yeah, The
glaciers grind the bedrock into a fine powder. The subglacial
river system dissolves the iron out of that powder, and
then it pumps that iron rich fresh water into the sea,
and that injection of iron triggers massive blooms of phytoplankton,
the base of the entire oceanic.
Speaker 1: Food web, which then feeds the crowd, which.
Speaker 2: Then feeds the whales, the seals, the penguins, everything.
Speaker 1: Including the blue whales. I want to pause on the
blue whale story for a moment because it's, yeah, it's
just so heartbreaking, but also weirdly hopeful.
Speaker 2: The sheer scale of the industrial whaling in the twentieth
century is hard to even comprehend. In the Southern Ocean,
we killed an estimated three hundred and sixty thousand blue whales.
Speaker 1: Three hundred and sixty thousand.
Speaker 2: We reduce the global population to about one percent of
its original size, maybe less one percent.
Speaker 1: Just trying to imagine if ninety nine percent of the
human population disappeared, it was a complete ecal logical collapse.
Speaker 2: It was. But now with the international ban on commercial whaling,
they're slowly, slowly starting to come back. The problem is
studying them is a logistical nightmare. They're incredibly fast, they're
very shy of boats, and the Southern Ocean has the
roughest seas on the planet, and.
Speaker 1: The report mentioned a group called Planet Wild, which I
thought was a really interesting angle. It shows how science
is adapting. It's not just giant government research ships anymore.
Speaker 2: No, it's becoming much more agile. Planet Wild is a
community funded organization and they help fund a mission that
use long range drones to study the whales.
Speaker 1: Which solves the observer problem.
Speaker 2: It totally changes the game. If you're chasing one hundred
foot whale with a loud diesel powered ship, the noise
stresses the animal out. You're not observing natural behavior. You're
observing a panicked animal trying to get away from you.
Speaker 1: But a drone flying a few hundred feet up is
basically silent to them.
Speaker 2: Relatively silent. Yes, it can fly through the whales, blow
the snot that shoots out and collect DNA samples. It
can use photogrammetry to precisely measure the whale's length and
body condition. It can track feeding behavior for hours, all
without the whale ever knowing it's there.
Speaker 1: And what they're finding is that these whales are congregating
in the exact areas where this nutrient rich water is
coming out from under the ice.
Speaker 2: They are completely dependent on that subglacial iron pump. We
just talked about. Their entire recovery hinges on it.
Speaker 1: It's all connected. If the subglacial plumbing system changes because
the ice sheet is melting differently, the iron pump is
shut off, the phytoplankton crash, the krill disappear, and the
whale star.
Speaker 2: That is the frightening fragility of the entire system.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've talked about the life at the edges
in the ocean. But let's go deeper now into the
deep biosphere. Let's talk about Lake.
Speaker 2: Vostoc, the holy grail of subglacial exploration. Lake Vostock is enormous.
It's about the size of Lake Ontario in North America,
and it's buried under four kilometers that's two and a
half miles of solid ice.
Speaker 1: And it's been sealed off for how long The.
Speaker 2: Estimates vary, but the consensus is somewhere between fifteen and
twenty five million years. It has been totally isolated for
a geologically significant amount of time.
Speaker 1: I remember reading about the Russians drilling into it a
few years ago. There was a lot of controversy around.
Speaker 2: Oh, it was a massive ethical and scientific debate in
the community. If you are about to puncture an ecosystem
that hasn't touched the outside atmosphere in millions of years,
how do you do it without contaminating it with your
own dirty, modern drill?
Speaker 1: Bit right, you don't want to be the person who
sneezes into the pristine Petri dish.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The Russian team used kerosene and free on as
a drilling fluid to keep the borehole from freezing shut,
which terrified environmentalists. But their method was actually quite clever.
They drilled down and stopped just above the liquid water.
Speaker 1: Oh, they didn't go all the way in.
Speaker 2: Not Initially, they let the immense pressure of the lake
below push fresh lake water up into the bottom of
the borehole. Then when they let that water freeze a
year later, they came back and drilled out that core
of freshly frozen pristine lake water. So they sampled the
lake without the drill ever touching the main body of water.
Speaker 1: That is clever.
Speaker 2: And what do they find They found life? They found
thousands of distinct DNA sequences. Now many were likely contaminants
from the drilling process. Yes, but a significant number appear
to be indigenous to the lake, mostly bacteria and Archaea
chematrovs organisms.
Speaker 1: They'd eat minerals and chemicals instead of some light.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this is the moment where the NASA folks
and the Astrobiology division really sit up and pay attention.
Speaker 1: This is the playground for thinking about Europa. Europa the
moon of Jupiter, which we are almost certain has a
liquid saltwater ocean underneath its outer ice shell, or Enceladus,
the moon of Saturn, which has geysers of water erupting
into space.
Speaker 2: If life can survive and even thrive in Lake Vostok
in total darkness, under crushing pressure, with no connection to
the sun, eating rock.
Speaker 1: Then there is absolutely no reason it couldn't exist on Europa.
Antarctica is the closest analog we have on Earth to
those icy alien worlds. It's our proof of concept for
life in the outer Solar System.
Speaker 2: It fundamentally changes the definition of a habitable world.
Speaker 1: It blows it wide open. It's not just about being
the right distance from your star anymore. It's about having
liquid water and an energy source which could just be
geothermal heat in chemistry.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to do a thought experiment. Now, let's
use the bedmap tow project data you mentioned. Let's take
a giant hypothetical hair dryer and melt every single cubic
inch of ice off the continent. What does the land
underneath actually look like.
Speaker 1: It looks completely unrecognizable, it's rugged, it's scarred, and it's
definitely not flat. The first thing you'd see are the
ghost Mountains, the gambird Sev Mountains. I mean, the name
alone is just fantastic.
Speaker 2: It's a geological paradox. The gambird Sevs are a mountain
range the size of the European Alps, tall, jagged, sharp
peaks located right in the bed center of East Denarctica,
the oldest part of the continent.
Speaker 1: And they shouldn't be there.
Speaker 2: They shouldn't look like that. Normally, mountains in the middle
of a continent are ancient and have been worn down
by billions of years of erosion. They should be rounded
stumps like the Appalachians. These look young and sharp, but they've.
Speaker 1: Been buried under ice for at least thirty million years,
and that's the key.
Speaker 2: The ice froze them in time. Glaciers usually erode mountains,
but if the ice at the base is what we
call cold basted, meaning it's frozen solid to the rock
and not sliding on a film of water, it actually
protects the rock. It's like shrink wrapping the mountains in
a protective shield.
Speaker 1: So we have this pristine alpine mountain range that no
human has ever seen, hidden under three kilometers of ice.
Speaker 2: And then if you look over in another part of
East Antarctica, you'd find the canyon Denman Canyon, the deepest
known land canyon on Earth. The Grand Canyon is impressive.
Sure it's a mile deep, but Denman Canyon plunges three
point five kilometers. That's eleven thousand, five hundred feet below
sea level level.
Speaker 1: It's hard to even visualize that scale.
Speaker 2: If you could stand at the bottom without the ice,
the canyon walls would tower over you, three times higher
than the walls of the Grand Canyon. It's a colossal feature.
Speaker 1: And then there's the Wilke's Land anomaly.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, the favorite of conspiracy theorists everywhere.
Speaker 1: But there is real science behind it.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. It's a massive gravity anomaly. Basically, when satellites
map the Earth a gravity field, they show a huge
concentration of mass in a roughly circular shape about four
hundred and eighty kilometers wide, buried deep under the ice
in a region called Wilkesland.
Speaker 1: And the leading theory is that it's an asteroid impact crater.
Speaker 2: That's the main hypothesis, yes, what geologists call a mask
on a mass concentration. The theory is that a truly
enormous asteroid, maybe the size of the one that killed
the dinosaurs, punched through the Earth's crust. The denser mantle
material then welled up to fill the hole, creating a
dense plug of rock that the satellites can detect because
of its higher gravity.
Speaker 1: And the timing. The estimates put it at around two
hundred and fifty million years ago.
Speaker 2: Which lines up almost perfectly with the Permian Triassic extinction event,
the Great Dying.
Speaker 1: The single worst extinction event in Earth's history.
Speaker 2: It is it's entirely possible that the impact that killed
over ninety percent of all life on Earth struck what
was then Antarctica, and then the continent drifted south, froze over,
and hid the murder weapon under miles of ice. We
can't prove it without drilling through the ice sheet. To
get rock samples, but the gravity signal is undeniably there.
Speaker 1: One more geological concept before we get to the really
thorny part, the politics II static rebound, because if we
melt all that ice, the land doesn't just sit there exposed.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. The Earth's crust is elastic in
a way, the unimaginable weight of the Antarctic ice sheet
is currently pushing the entire continent's crust down into the
semi molten mantle by hundreds of meters.
Speaker 1: Like sitting down on a memory film mattress.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. And if you stand up from
the mattress, if the ice melts, the weight is lifted,
but the mantle is incredibly viscous. It's like thick honey.
It takes a very long time to flow back into place.
So the land will slowly, over thousands of years, rise
back up.
Speaker 1: We see that happening elsewhere, right.
Speaker 2: We're still seeing it today in places like Scandinavia and Canada,
which are still rising. From the end of the Last
ice Age ten thousand years ago, an Arctica would rise dramatically,
changing global sea levels and the shape of the oceans
even further.
Speaker 1: So the map is not static. It's breathing, it's moving,
it's rising, it's falling. But now we have to talk
about the human lines we try to draw on that map,
the geopolitics.
Speaker 2: The who owns Antarctica question.
Speaker 1: We'll set the scene. It's nineteen fifty nine. The Cold
War is at its peak. The US and the USS
are appointing thousands of nuclear weapons at each other, and
yet somehow they sit down and sign the Antarctic Treaty.
Speaker 2: Why it was a remarkable moment of scientific sanity in
a politically insane time. Scientists from all over the world
had just collaborated on the International Geophysical Years in nineteen
fifty seven. They'd been working together peacefully in Antarctica, and
they realized that if they allowed the Cold War to
come down to the ice, it would ruin this unique
laboratory for everyone.
Speaker 1: So they carved it out.
Speaker 2: Twelve nations, including the US and the Soviet Union, signed
the treaty. It designated the entire continent as a zone
for peace and science only, no military bases, no nuclear
testing or waste disposal, and crucially, it put all existing
territorial claims on ice.
Speaker 1: On ice is the operative word isn't it. Because seven
countries claim these big pie shaped slices of the continent,
the UK, France, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Chili.
Speaker 2: Argentina right, and their claims overlap and are contentious. So
the treaty cleverly says, Okay, we aren't going to recognize
your claims, but we aren't going to deny them either.
We're just going to agree to ignore them for the
duration of the treaty.
Speaker 1: The diplomatic agree to disagree exactly.
Speaker 2: And then in the nineteen nineties they added the Madrid Protocol,
And this is the real shield. The protocol explicitly banned
all mining and mineral exploration on.
Speaker 1: The continent because they knew what was probably down there.
Speaker 2: They had a very good idea. Antarctica was the heart
of the super continent Gondwana. It connects geologically to Australia,
South Africa, and South America, three of the most mineral
rich regions on Earth. It is a geological certainty that
Antarctica holds vast untapped deposits of coal, iron, copper, gold, platinum,
and almost certainly oil and gas.
Speaker 1: One of the reports I saw estimated as much as
two hundred billion barrels of oil.
Speaker 2: Which is a colossal amount, and in a resource constrained
twenty first century world, that is a very, very tempting prize.
Speaker 1: So the ban is in place. But here is the
ticking clock that we teas at the start of the show,
the year twenty forty eight. What happens then?
Speaker 2: There's a common misconception that the entire Antarctic Treaty expires
in twenty forty eight. It doesn't. But the Madrid Protocol,
the part with the mining ban, has a special clause.
It says that after fifty years of being in force,
which happens to be the year twenty forty eight, any
of the main treaty can call for a conference to
review the ban.
Speaker 1: So they can call for a vote to start digging.
Speaker 2: They can force the issue onto the table. Now, the
rules to actually change the ban are very strict. You
need a consensus. But international law is only as strong
as the willingness of powerful nations to abide by it.
If a superpower decides in twenty forty nine, you know what,
I'm withdrawing from the protocol and I'm going to drill
who realistically is going to stop them? Are we going
to fight a naval war in the Southern Ocean over.
Speaker 1: It, and the positioning, the maneuvering is already happening. Well,
let's talk about what Russia is doing with Rauziologia.
Speaker 2: Rasteolosia is the Russian state run geological exploration agency. For
the past several years, they have been conducting massive seismic
surveys in the Widell Sea and other areas. Now, seismic
surveys are a legitimate scientific tool. You use powerful air
guns to send sound waves into the seabed to map
the walk layers. But that is the exact same technology
you used to prospect for oil and gas reserves.
Speaker 1: So they claim its pure science, but the West suspects
its prospect.
Speaker 2: It's dual use science. They are quietly and systematically mapping
the continent's reserves. They're building a detailed inventory so that
if or when the legal regime changes, they know exactly
where to put the oil rigs on day one.
Speaker 1: And what about China.
Speaker 2: China is a newer player in Antarctica, but they are
moving much much faster. They've controversially declared themselves a near
Arctic state, and they're applying that same strategic logic. To
the south, they're building their fifth research station, a huge
year round facility, on a place called Inexpressible Island. They
are building a fleet of heavy.
Speaker 1: Ice breakers, the ice silk Road, that's.
Speaker 2: Their term for it. Yes, their strategy appears to be
logistical dominance. The thinking is, if you have the best ships,
the most air strips, and the most permanent bases spread
across the continent, you control the reality on the ground
regardless of what some treaty says.
Speaker 1: And how does the US presence compare.
Speaker 2: The main US presence is centered at McMurdo Station, and
a lot of its infrastructure is well, it's aging. It
dates back to the sixties and seventies. We are falling
behind in the race for capability and presence.
Speaker 1: So you have this perfect storm brewing. The ice is melting,
which is making physical access to the continent easier than
ever before. The world is getting more desperate for resources,
and the main legal protection comes up for review in
just over twenty years.
Speaker 2: It is a recipe for conflict and there's a very
clever moral argument that will be made, and we need
to be ready for it. Countries will start to say, look,
we need these rare earth metals for green technology. We
need the lithium in Antarctica for electric car batteries. Is
it truly ethical to leave these resources buried under the
ice when humanity needs them to transition away from fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: Wow, that is a devilishly clever argument. Destroy the last
pristine wilderness on Earth in order to save the rest
of the planet.
Speaker 2: It's the argument we are almost certain to hear in
the run up to twenty forty eight.
Speaker 1: It just makes you realize that Antarctica isn't safe because
we all agree it should be. It's just paused. Its
fate is in a holding pattern, and.
Speaker 2: The ice itself is changing the game. As the sea
ice retreats, more and more ships can get closer. Tourism
is absolutely exploding. Bioprospecting, where companies are searching for those
unique microbes we talked about to create new drugs or enzymes,
is already a legal gray area. The physical isolation that
protected Antarctica for fifteen million years is effectively gone.
Speaker 1: This has been well, it's been heavy, but it's also
been absolutely fascinating. We've gone from the microscopic breath of
ancient bacteria inside an ice core to the movement of
entire continence and the strategic posturing of nuclear powers.
Speaker 2: It just shows that you can't separate the science from
the politics down there. The ice core data is what
drives global climate policy. The underlying geology is what drives
the resource hunger. The geography is what drives the placement
of strategic bases. It is all one big, tangled, frozen knot.
Speaker 1: So I want to leave our listener with the question
that the experts and diplomats are already whispering about in
the corridors of these treaty meetings.
Speaker 2: Twenty forty eight question.
Speaker 1: I want you imagine it's twenty forty eight. You're at
the negotiating table. The world population is close to ten billion.
Energy's expensive, key materials are scarce. But you have this
one continent, this one last white shield that has never
been mined. Do you vote to keep it a pristine
scientific preserve forever, knowing the potential economic cost, or do
you vote to open the vault?
Speaker 2: Is Antarctica a sanctuary or is it a warehouse for
humanity's future needs?
Speaker 1: I genuinely want to know where you stand on this.
Is it inevitable that we start digging or can we
and should we actually hold the line? Leave us a comment,
send us a message on social media. Really love to
see the poll numbers on that one.
Speaker 2: It might be one of the biggest collective decisions of
the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: Thank you for taking this deep plunge with us. This
has been thrilling threads. Keep pulling on those loose ends.
You never know what you'll find.