Speaker 1: Okay, so what if everything you thought you knew about
our planet was just well the surface, like just a
tiny glimpse of this incredibly ancient and dynamic story happening
beneath our feet.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating thought, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Totally imagine entire continents that have vanished, not into myth,
but actually into the Earth itself, or maybe they're just
quietly hiding, you know, under other continents. We're deep down
in the oceans where we haven't really looked right.
Speaker 2: And today we're not just talking about old legends.
Speaker 1: No exactly, We're diving into real, tangible, scientific discoveries, stuff
that's basically rewriting Earth's history, showing us a world it's
way more active and mysterious, maybe even more alive than
we usually think.
Speaker 2: It's constantly changing, constantly evolving.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive. This is where we grab
a whole stack of fascinating sources and just plunge right
into the heart of our well, constantly evolving planet.
Speaker 2: And today's journey really spans scales, doesn't it, For microscopic
clues in ancient rocks, all the way.
Speaker 1: Up to the grand scale that sort of slow motion
dance of supercontinents. We'll explore the immense power of geology,
listen to these weird sounds from the deep ocean.
Speaker 2: The enigmatic whispers yeah, and.
Speaker 1: Even try to glimpse Earth's future. It feels like every
discovery doesn't just add a piece to the puzzle, It
kind of changes the whole picture.
Speaker 2: It really transforms our understanding.
Speaker 1: So our mission here in this deep dive is to
give you a shortcut, a way to get truly well
informed about Earth's hidden marvels without having to weigh through
all the raw data yourself.
Speaker 2: We'll try to unravel these geological puzzles, look at the
cutting edge science behind how we're finding this stuff out.
Speaker 1: And kenneth the dots right. See why these huge, often
invisible changes actually matter to us, to life on Earth
and the future of our home world.
Speaker 2: Get ready for some potentially mind bending moments.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, prepare for some aha moments, because what we're
exploring today might just shift how you think about the
very ground you're standing on.
Speaker 2: It's genuinely humbling when you realize how much we're still
finding out about our own planet. We tend to see
Earth as this, you know, static backdrop, a stage for
our lives, right, just kind of there exactly. But these
sources paint a picture of a churning, living thing with
this incredible deep memory constantly reshaping itself.
Speaker 1: Is a profound thought, and maybe the best place to
start unraveling that memory is with something huge, like an
entire tectonic plate just vanishing.
Speaker 2: It sounds impossible, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It really does. For years, geologists were apparently stumped by
this weird gap in the sea between South China and Borneo.
And even if you know about plate tectonics, the idea
of a whole plate disappearing, yeah, it's just mind boggling.
How does subduction actually achieve that? Making something that big.
Speaker 2: Just vanish it is monumental. So, you know, tectonic plates,
these enormous puzzle pieces making up Earth's outer shell, the
Lifo sphere. They're not floating on lava like some people.
Speaker 1: Think, right, that old misconception.
Speaker 2: Yeah, They're gliding on a semi fluid layer of the
mantle underneath. And subduction is the key. When a denser
plate's edge slides under another, it's not just the edge.
Given enough time millions of years, the entire massive plate
can get pulled down into the mantle, pulled down and
basically recycled, exactly melted and recycled. The is Anagi plate,
for example. Everyone thought that one subducted completely maybe fifty
five million years ago, But in that specific spot between
South China and Borneo, the evidence for Isanagi just didn't
quite line up. It left this big geological riddle.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if the is an Aggie story didn't fit
the local evidence, how did researchers finally figure it out?
Because what they found it wasn't just not is Anagi,
it was something totally new, right, like a ghost from
the past.
Speaker 2: Precisely, researchers at Utrek University they finally cracked it. They
figured out that this unexplained gap, it wasn't is Anoggi's
leftover footprint at all. It was actually the mark of
a previously unknown plate, a ghost tectonic plate.
Speaker 1: They called it a ghost plate.
Speaker 2: I love that they named it the Pontus plate, after
the ancient Pontus Ocean it used to sit under.
Speaker 1: That name just evokes so much mystery. But okay, if
it disappeared so long ago, how on earth do scientists
find these things. It's not like they leave. You know,
footprints we can follow.
Speaker 2: No, not footprints, but something maybe even better. Rocks. Rocks
are amazing time capsules. Right as they cool down and
solidify magnetic minerals inside them, things like magnetite. They align
with Earth's magnetic field at that exact moment in time, like.
Speaker 1: Tiny compass needles frozen in place exactly.
Speaker 2: It freezes a record of the field's direction and strength.
And because the field's direction changes depending on latitude, these
old rocks give you a snapshot of where they were
relative to the equator when they first formed.
Speaker 1: That is genuinely ingenious. So what did the rocks and
Borneo show that pointed towards this Pontius Plate.
Speaker 2: Well, the researchers in Borneo, they collected and studied these
ancient rocks really carefully, and what they found was pretty strange.
They the magnetic signature showed these rocks came from much
farther north than they should have if they'd been part
of Asanagi or any other plate.
Speaker 1: We knew about way off the expected mark completely.
Speaker 2: So that discovery led them to two realizations. First, there
was this weird gap in the known geology for that area,
and second, there had to have been another hidden plate there,
the Pontis Plate.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And to really piece this geological ghost together, they used
these advanced computer models. They simulated the whole region's geology
over one hundred and sixty million years, painstakingly rebuilding the
Pontas Plate, figuring out its original massive size.
Speaker 1: So this Pondas Plate, just how big are we talking?
What happened to it in the end?
Speaker 2: Oh, it was immense truly colossal. They think it formed
at least one hundred and sixty million years ago, maybe
even older. And size wise picture about one quarter the
size of the entire Pacific.
Speaker 1: Ocean and quarter of the Pacific. That's staggering, it really is.
Speaker 2: But like many plates, it eventually met its end around
twenty million years. It got completely pulled under, subducted beneath
the Australian Plate to the south and under China to
the north, just vanished back into the mantle. It's a
powerful reminder of that constant recycling process.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just those magnetic clues in the rocks, right,
Were there other breadcrumbs that they followed to track down Pontus.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. Yeah, there were other subtle hints
traces found in places like Palawan, which is an island
in the Philippines, and also in the South China Sea. Actually,
the scientific community I kind of suspected there might be
a missing Western plate for maybe a decade or more.
Oh really, Yeah, Studies looking at how the crust moved
between Japan and New Zealand suggested there needed to be
a subduction zone and some unknown plate out west to
make the models work. And beyond rocks, you know, subducting
plates changed the mantle below them. They caused volcanoes, earthquakes,
deep ocean trenches.
Speaker 1: Probe the big geological markers.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and they changed the mantles chemistry and temperature too,
creating these detectable anomalies. So it's really like piecing together
clues from multiple angles, magnetic, seismic, structural.
Speaker 1: It's amazing we can reconstruct history that deep. But seeing
these things miles under of the ground, that sounds incredibly hard.
You mentioned traditional methods or maybe costly or low res.
What's the new tech giving geologists this kind of X
ray vision.
Speaker 2: Well, the real game changer recently has been something called
distributed acoustic sensing or DAS.
Speaker 1: A DAS.
Speaker 2: Yeah, DAS. It's incredibly clever. It basically turns existing fiber
optic cables, the same ones used for high speed internet,
into thousands and thousands of tiny earthquake detectors.
Speaker 1: Whoaah wait How.
Speaker 2: They send laser beams down the cables and any tiny
movement in the ground from an earthquake or even just
heavy traffic or ocean waves hitting the coast, It causes
microscopic changes in how the light reflects back.
Speaker 1: So the cables themselves become sensors.
Speaker 2: Exactly thousands of them along the length of the cable.
This lets scientists create these unprecedented almost ultrasound like images
miles down, especially in the Moho region, that boundary between
the crust and the mantle. DAS is revealing major fault lines,
how continents were shaped billions of years ago, and yeah,
new clues about hidden plates like Pontus. It's revolutionizing how
we map the Earth's insides.
Speaker 1: It really does sound like we're finally giving the Earth
a proper checkup. And speaking of continents, you know, we
all learn about the seven continents in school, right the
standard map, But geoscientists they define continents differently, right, not
just by land above water, but by rock type, and
from that angle, the number of continents actually goes up
because of these lost continents hidden away.
Speaker 2: That's right. It broadens our definition. It's not just about
what pokes above the sea level. It's about the underlying geology,
the continental crust. And yeah, there are these other continental
masses hidden beneath other land masses or submerged under the oceans.
Speaker 1: And one of the most amazing examples sounds completely fantastical.
Greater Adria, a land mass the size of Greenland now
buried under Europe, Italy, Grease, the Baltics. They're sitting on
top of a lost continent. That's just wild.
Speaker 2: It genuinely is mind bending. Greater Adria formed maybe two
hundred and forty million years ago. It broke off from
the ancient super continent Gondwana, and then it drifted north
like this giant geological ship, sailing across ancient seas for
millions of years. Eventually, though, it collided.
Speaker 1: With Europe and that was the end of it.
Speaker 2: Well, yes and no. The collision caused it to shatter
and mostly subduct slide underneath Europe, but it left fragments behind.
Parts of it are embedded in the Alps. You find
chunks in modern day Italy and Croatia, and here's a
beautiful link. Yeah, the limestone rocks from Greater Adria. When
they got buried under immense heat and pressure, they transformed
into marble, the same marble used in countless ancient Greek
and Roman temples. Oh way, Yeah, it's like a geological
that literally provided the building blocks for parts of Western civilization.
Speaker 1: That's incredible and going away gift. So Greater Adria is buried. Yeah,
But then there's Zeelandia, which is more like hiding under
the ocean. You can even see it's Atlanta Google Maps right,
Earth's eighth continent.
Speaker 2: Zeelandi is a perfect example of hiding in plain sight.
A massive ninety five percent of it is underwater beneath
the Pacific. It stretches from New Caledonia down towards New Zealand.
Speaker 1: How big is it compared to say, Australia.
Speaker 2: It's roughly two thirds the size of Australia and more
than double the size of Greater Adria. Only about seven
percent is above sea level. That's New Zealand and Stuart Island.
But geologically it is continental crust. It's just thinner and
younger than the core parts of other continents.
Speaker 1: And how do we know it's continental?
Speaker 2: Scientists found ancient zircon crystals in its rocks, those amazing
time capsules again dating back one point three billion years plus.
They've mapped its mass using magnetic data, topography, even satellite
gravity tracking. It broke away from Antarctica about one hundred
million years ago, another silent giant beneath the waves.
Speaker 1: Okay, so buried continents, submerged continents. And now this really
radical idea Icelandia, a submerged micro continent between Greenland and Scandinavia.
That sounds like it throws a wrench in the standard
story of the North Atlantic opening up.
Speaker 2: The Icelandia theory is definitely starring the pot. Yeah, it's
still controversial, but it suggests this submerged land mass maybe
two hundred and thirty thousand square miles, was once dry land.
It challenges the long held view that the North Atlantic
only formed when Pangaea split apart two hundred million years ago.
Speaker 1: What's the evidence for it?
Speaker 2: A key piece is the crust beneath iceland itself. It's
unusually thick, about twenty five meters compared to maybe five
meters for typical oceanic crust, and it's made of silica
and granite, which are typical continental rocks. Ah Plus, magnetic
surveys of the ocean floor show these weird stripe patterns
of molten crust that might fit this continental remnant idea.
They need more research, of course, drilling for Zircon's more
seismic surveys. And there's even talk of a greater Icelandia. Yeah,
some proponents speculate about a much larger ancient land mass
connecting Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia and Greenland. Think about the implications
for ancient forests, maybe even ancient migration routes. It's speculative,
but fascinating. Someone even joked about future oceanic trains connecting them.
Speaker 1: An oceanic train, it's quite the image. Okay, So the
world wasn't always separated by these vast oceans. We had
land bridges too, like the Broken Ridge and the Indian Ocean,
connecting India and Antarctica exactly.
Speaker 2: These land bridges are crucial for understanding how plants and
animals spread in the past. Broken Ridge, this oceanic plateau
physically linked India and Antarctica millions of years ago, and
from clues on nearby islands, scientists think its climate was temperate, rainy,
supporting tropical life, almost like modern New Zealand.
Speaker 1: Wow, so different from Antarctica today.
Speaker 2: Totally different. It shows how dramatically things can change.
Speaker 1: And speaking of connections, Madagascar, that unique island actually came
from India, not Africa. And there's another loss cottonent involved Marisia.
Speaker 2: That's right, Madagascar split from India about one hundred and
twenty million years ago. And the Mauritia discover under Mauritius
Island is amazing. They found these incredibly old zircon crystals,
some up to two billion years old, mixed in with
much younger volcanic.
Speaker 1: Rock two billion years Yeah.
Speaker 2: These ancient crystals are remnants of a lost liver of land,
a kind of ribbon like continent called Mauritia that once
stretched from Mauritius to the west coast of India, another
forgotten piece of the Gondwana super continent.
Speaker 1: Puzzle. The Earth just keeps revealing these lost chapters. And
even if we go back just fifty thousand years, Southeast
Asia looked completely different. No Sumatra, Borneo, Java, as separate islands, not.
Speaker 2: As we know them today. Back then, during the Last
Ice Age, when sea levels were lower, you had two
massive land masses, Sunda, which was basically mainland Southeast Asia
extended much further south Okay, and Sahoul which was greater Australia,
connecting Australia, New Guinea, Tasmania, even the Aru Islands into
one huge continent.
Speaker 1: Wow. And what separated them.
Speaker 2: A deep water trench, a significant barrier even then, was
effectively the southernmost tip of Asia.
Speaker 1: At that time.
Speaker 2: This geography was fundamental to how early humans and animals
migrated across the region.
Speaker 1: That deep trench separating Sunda and Saho, that sounds like
a perfect lead into the Wallace line, this invisible divide
Alfred Russell Wallace spotted one hundred and fifty years ago
in the Malay Archipelago.
Speaker 2: It's one of the classic stories in biogeography. Wallace noticed
the startling difference. On islands like Borneo and Sumatra, the
animals were clearly Asian rhinos monkeys, but just across this
invisible line, on islands like Sulawesi and Lumbach, they were
Australian cockatoos. Marsupials.
Speaker 1: So different yet so close geographically. What explains it?
Speaker 2: The explanation is pure geology, deep time geology. Around thirty
five million years ago, Australia, having broken off Antarctica, started
drifting north. Eventually it began colliding with Asia. One source
called it a continental love triangle.
Speaker 1: Oh, I got it.
Speaker 2: This massive collision created the island chain we see today
the Malay Archipelago. But it it also triggered huge climate shifts.
The Asian side stayed warm and rainy, and Asian species
thrived using the new islands as stepping stones towards Australia. Okay,
But the Australian animals, adapted to cooler, drier conditions, found
it much harder to cross into this new tropical environment.
The Wallas line marks that ecological boundary created by the
continental collision.
Speaker 1: So this ancient smashup is basically why Australia has such
unique animals kangaroos platypus.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's the fundamental reason the collision isolated Australian fauna
and shaped its evolution. It highlights how profoundly living things
are affected by the shifting land. Some even think it
might help explain homolusinensis, that ancient human species found in
the Philippines with weird primitive features. Maybe their ancestors were
isolated on.
Speaker 1: That southern side.
Speaker 2: Fascinating link and understanding this helps scientists predict how animals
might react to future climate change. Too. It's not the
only line either. Weber's line is another attempt to map
these boundaries.
Speaker 1: This constant movement just underscores that continents aren't fixed. They've
come together and broken apart before, like with Pangaea. The
ultimate super.
Speaker 2: Continent, Pangaea, meaning all Earth. It existed roughly three hundred
to two hundred million years ago, bringing all of today's
continents together into one giant land mass surrounded by one
huge ocean, Panthalasa, and an inner sea called the Tephis.
It's fundamental to understanding Earth's cycles.
Speaker 1: And Alfred Wiener proposed continental drift back in nineteen twelve,
seeing how the coastlines fit like South America and Africa
and finding similar rocks and fossils. But people didn't buy
it at first, did they?
Speaker 2: No, He faced huge skepticism. The big problem was how
could these massive continents possibly plow through the ocean floor.
Nobody could explain the mechanism. It wasn't until the nineteen sixties,
with the development of the theory of plate tectonics, that
Wijener was finally vindicated. Plate tectonics provided the how the
Earth's outer shell is broken into plates and these plates
are moving.
Speaker 1: So they're not floating on lava. How did these massive
plates actually move? What's driving them?
Speaker 2: Think of Earth like a maybe a peach or on
the thin skin. The crust below that is the thick mantle,
mostly solid rock, but under incredible heat and pressure. It
behaves like extremely thick, slow moving honey or syrup over
millions of years.
Speaker 1: Okay, convection currents exactly.
Speaker 2: These slow convection currents and the upper mantle drag the
rigid tectonic plates along on top, so the plates crack, stretch, bend, collide,
slide under each other's subduct This whole engine, driven by
heat escaping from the Earth's core, started maybe three point
five billion years ago and formed earlier super continents too,
like er and Rodinia. It's this incredibly slow but powerful.
Speaker 1: Process, mind boggling time scales and forces. But this drifting
isn't over. Scientists are predicting the next Pangaea maybe two
hundred and fifty million years from now.
Speaker 2: That's right, the cycle continues. Geologists project that in roughly
two hundred and fifty million years, the continents will likely
all come back together again, forming a new super continent.
There are a few different scenarios based on current pleat movements,
like what Well. One is Novopangia. In that one, the
Atlantic keeps widening, the Pacific closes up, and the Americas
and Antarctica eventually smash into Afro Eurasia. Another is Amasia.
Here both the Pacific and Atlantic close and most continents
drift north, clustering around the North Pole. The Americas fuse
with Australia and kind of pivot towards Siberia. There are
others too, like Pangaea, Ultima, and Aura, each with slightly
different configurations depending on which oceans close and where the
continents end up meeting.
Speaker 1: These future worlds sound incredibly different. What would the consequences be?
It's more than just redrawing the map, surely.
Speaker 2: Oh, the consequences would be profound, completely changing life on Earth.
A super continent would drastically alter global climate. Imagine vast
scorching deserts in the interior, totally different ocean currents, radically
different weather patterns. It would likely cause mass.
Speaker 1: Extinctions, tough time for life.
Speaker 2: Definitely, humans, if we're still around, would need incredible creativity
just to adept and sur But what's also useful about
these models is they help scientists understand the potential climates
and geology of exoplanets we're discovering around other stars. It
gives us a framework for thinking about planetary evolution everywhere.
Speaker 1: From supercontinents to impassable jungles. Let's shift to some extreme
environments on Earth today. We have to talk about the
Darien Gap, that sixty mile stretch of dense jungle and
mountains between Panama and Columbia, a true natural barrier.
Speaker 2: The Burying Gap is really something else, a genuine no
man's land, no roads, no real infrastructure. It's this natural
wall connecting North and South America, known as one of
the most dangerous places on Earth, completely isolated.
Speaker 1: And tragically, it's become this route of desperation for migrants
heading north. The numbers are just staggering, from under ten
thousand crossing in twenty fourteen to over half a million
in twenty twenty three. A humanitarian crisis in this incredibly
hostile place.
Speaker 2: The dangers they face are almost unimaginable. Insect bites to
severe infections, serious broken bones from falls, the constant thread
of thieves because there's zero law enforcement. Dehydration is rampant,
forcing people to drink contaminated river water, leading to terrible
intestinal problems. The heat is brutal, often over ninety five
degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: And no help if something goes wrong.
Speaker 2: Absolutely none, no medical aid whatsoever. It's an environment that
seems almost designed to break human resilience.
Speaker 1: Nature's obstacle course what makes the terrain itself so uniquely difficult.
Speaker 2: You're looking at incredibly dense rainforest. Visibility is practically zero
in places. The paths where they exist are steep, incredibly muddy, treacherous.
You're clamoring over boulders, getting tangled in vines. Add constant
heavy rain, landslides, flash floods, must and the rivers powerful
fast moving rivers that can be shouldered deep and literally
rip your shoes off. It's just a constant physical battle.
Even historically well equipped expeditions struggled immensely, and eighteen fifty
four expedition van for forty nine days battling starvation. It's
always been incredibly harsh.
Speaker 1: And wildlife isn't exactly friendly either, I assume definitely not.
Speaker 2: You've got jaguars, aggressive white lipped peckeries and the highly
venomous Fardelon snake. Swarms of mosquitoes spreading diseases. Even the
plants are dangerous. The Chunga palm has these eight inch
long spines covered in bacteria that cause nasty infections if
you stumble into one. Getting lost is a constant danger,
though apparently there are some color coded markers now blue
green for the path, red for wrong way, put up
by previous migrants or guides.
Speaker 1: Given all that, why hasn't a road been built? The
Pan American Highway goes from Alaska all the way down
to Argentina, but just stops dead at the Darien. What's
the hold of It's a combination of factors.
Speaker 2: The humid climate, the incredibly difficult terrain, the constant rain.
It makes road building not just hard but astronomically expensive.
But beyond the cost and logistics, there's huge opposition from
environmental groups and indigenous communities. The Darian Gap is one
of the most biodiverse places left on Earth. About one
in five species there is endemic found nowhere else, like
the Darien pocket gopher. Ah the biodiversity Angle exactly attempts
to build a road in the seventies and nineties were
scrapped specifically to protect this unique ecosystem. They tried a
ferry service as an alternative, but it wasn't profitable, and
recently Panama actually put up barbed wire fencing to try
and close the migration route. It remains this unconquered natural barrier.
Speaker 1: From the jungle to the ice, flying to Antarctica or
even just over the South Pole. It sounds straightforward, but
it's incredibly difficult, right right, Why is it so hard?
Speaker 2: It's mainly down to the extreme conditions and the almost
complete lack of infrastructure. There are very few airports and
none are equipped for regular commercial passenger flights. Critically, there
are no refueling stations suitable for the kind of long
haul commercial traffic we see elsewhere, so it's mostly specialized
cargo or research flights serving the tiny population there.
Speaker 1: And the conditions must be for pilots too. Special training required.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, pilots need specific, expensive training to handle the harsh,
unpredictable Antarctic weather. Plus there are strict regulations called e
TOPPS Extended Range twin Engine Operational Performance Standards ETEPS. Yeah,
these rules dictate how far a twin engine plane can
fly from the nearest suitable emergency airport. Since there are
so few airports in Anerica, huge swaths of the continent
are effectively off limits for many standard flight paths. Historically,
it made flying directly over much of it almost impossible.
Newer planes have longer e top PS ratings now maybe
three hundred and thirty or three hundred and seventy minutes,
but large areas are still restricted.
Speaker 1: Is there any way for say, a tourist to fly there.
Speaker 2: There is one operation, Antarctic Airways, billed as the world's
most exclusive transcontinental flight, but it only runs from December
to March, mostly to King George Island, and the prices
are steep ol steep, around fifty five hundred dollars for
just a day trip, up to one hundred and twenty
five thousand dollars if you want a charter, but it
is much faster than a cruise ship. Two hours flying
versus maybe two days sailing. You get to see a
research station penguin colonies.
Speaker 1: Wow, still quite exclusive. It wasn't there a major tragedy
involving Antarctic sight seeing flights years ago?
Speaker 2: Yes? Tragically Air New Zealand flight nine oh one crashed
into Mount Erebus back in nineteen seventy nine. All two
hundred and fifty seven people on board were killed. These
are popular sites seeing flights over Antarctica.
Speaker 1: What caused it?
Speaker 2: Initially they blamed pilot error, but a later rural commission
found the main cause was a critical error back at headquarters.
Someone changed the flight path coordinates in the navigation system,
directing the plane towards the mountain instead of the safe
route over McMurdo Sound, and crucially, the flight crew was
never told about the change. A terrible, avoidable tragedy, Just awful.
Speaker 1: It seems like the skies over the South Pole are
incredibly empty compared to the North Pole. Why the big difference?
Speaker 2: It really comes down to where people live. Something like
eighty eight to ninety percent of the world's population in
the northern hemisphere, so naturally you have far more air
traffic connecting cities. There are routes like Copenhagen to La
or London to Tokyo often fly near or over the
North Pole.
Speaker 1: Makes sense.
Speaker 2: Southern Hemisphere flights are fewer, mainly connecting places like Australia,
New Zealand, Southern South America and Southern Africa. Direct flights
over the South Pole are extremely rare. Some airlines like
Kontis or Latam fly routes that pass close to the
Antarctic coast mainly to take advantage of favorable winds, but
not directly over the pole itself.
Speaker 1: And we can't forget the penguins. Apparently the penguin factor.
Speaker 2: Huh. Yes, it's a slightly humorous but real point. Penguins
and Antarctica have no natural land predators, so they're completely
unafraid of humans or structures. Trying to build anything significant
like a major airport in their territory would be incredibly
disruptive and face huge opposition. They kind of rule the
roosts down there.
Speaker 1: So from the challenges on the surface, let's go underneath
the ice again to the gambert Sev subglacial mountains. Antarctica's
secret out a huge mountain range completely hidden.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible concept, isn't it. A vast mountain range
similar in scale to the European Alps, buried under miles
of ice, mountains, valleys, hills, plains, a whole landscape totally
untouched and unseen by human eyes, a land inside another land.
Speaker 1: When were they discovered and why are they still so mysterious?
Speaker 2: They were first detected back in nineteen fifty eight using
seismic instruments, basically listening for echoes bouncing off the rock
beneath the ice, but they remain one of the most
poorly studied major features on Earth simply because of the
immense thickness of that ice sheet covering them. It makes
direct exploration incredibly difficult and expensive.
Speaker 1: So it's not full of ancient cities or hidden spaceships then, huh.
Speaker 2: While the imagination can run wild, the real scientific value
is immense. We know mountain ranges usually form when tectonic
plates collide over millions of years, like the Himalayas still
rising today as India pushes into Asia. But the Gambert
says a different, much older story.
Speaker 1: Okay, so how did these buried mountains form.
Speaker 2: Their origins go way back to the formation of the
super continent Gondwana, maybe seven hundred million years ago. Gondwana
included what's now Africa, South America, Australia, India, and Antarctica.
It seems the Gambritzevs formed when two huge land masses
collided within Gondwana, creating a rift valley. Then intense heat
from the mantle caused uplift along the wrist flanks, pushing
up these mountains. It wasn't just a simple collision. It
involved rifting and heat from below. They likely reached Himalayan
heights around five hundred and eighty million years ago, during
a period when Gondwana itself was assembling and stabilizing.
Speaker 1: And how do scientists date something like that buried under
so much ice? Is it those zircons again?
Speaker 2: Exactly? Zircons are the geologist's best friend for dating ancient events.
These tiny, super durable mineral grains contain uranium, which decays
into lead at a perfectly known constant rate. By measuring
their ratio of uranium to lead and zircons found in
sediments derived from the gamber Sevs like an offshore drill course,
scientists can pinpoint when the mountains formed and cooled. It's
like reading a geological clock.
Speaker 1: And what's really unique about the Gambert sevs is how
well preserved they are, right unlike mountains exposed to the elements.
Speaker 2: That's one of the most amazing aspects. Most mountain ranges
get eroded down over hundreds of millions of years by rivers, glaciers,
wind rain, but the Gambert sieves have been protected, kept
in this kind of deep freeze under the Antarctic ice
sheet for possibly over five hundred million years. They haven't
really eroded much since the ice formed, so they're one
of the best preserved ancient mountain belts on the entire planet,
a snapshot of Earth's deep past.
Speaker 1: So why explore them? What's the big draw? Given the
huge challenges and cost, What could we find down there?
Speaker 2: The potential payoff is just immense scientifically thrilling. If we
could drill through the ice and sample the rocks the valleys,
we might find frozen ancient plants, insects, maybe even bacteria
that lived when are to go is warmer, maybe even
forested half a billion years ago, like.
Speaker 1: A lost world preserved in ice.
Speaker 2: Potentially it could completely change our understanding of Earth's past climates,
the evolution of life in extreme conditions, maybe even raise
the highly speculative but fascinating idea of finding genetic material
from ancient creatures. It's a window into a completely different
earth locked away under the ice. The logistical challenges are enormous,
but the potential discoveries are revolutionary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, from hidden giants under the ice to unseen
terrifying forces in the ocean, underwater avalanches or turbidity currents.
You're saying these can be more dangerous than landslides on land.
Speaker 2: Often, Yes, they can be vastly larger, travel much faster
and further, and carry enormous destructive power. And because they
happen underwater, they're invisible, hard to predict, difficult to measure directly,
and they pose this huge risk, especially to our global
communication infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And there was a truly massive one, the Aggadier Canyon Monster,
off Africa's coast, sixty thousand years ago. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2: This event really opened scientist's eyes to the sheer scale possible.
It started relatively small, maybe zero point three to five
cubic miles of sediments sliding underwater in the Agadier Canyon,
but as it rushed down slope and across the Atlantic seabed,
it grew and grew, apparently in training more sediment as
it went over one hundred times its initial size.
Speaker 1: One hundred times bigger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it carved this devastating path, eroding a huge section
of the canyon, cutting hundreds of feet into its size,
and damaging an area of seafloor over seventeen hundred square miles.
That's bigger than Rhode Island. It showed scientists they had
been seriously underestimating the potential destruction.
Speaker 1: But this isn't just ancient history. A more recent one
from the Congo River in twenty twenty actually broke Internet
cables right exactly.
Speaker 2: January fourteenth, twenty twenty, a huge turbidity current rushed over
six hundred and eighty miles out from the Congo River estuary.
It was triggered by severe river flooding combined with unusually
large spring tides. This avalanche of sand and mud carried
an amount of sediment equal to about a third of
what all the rivers in the world produce in a
whole year. Incredible volume, and it accelerated from about seventeen
feet per second up to twenty six feet per second.
It became the longest running sediment avalanche ever directly measured
two days later when it reached the deep ocean, it
snacked two vital seabed telecommunication.
Speaker 1: Cables, cutting off internet speeds across Africa.
Speaker 2: Yeah, significantly slowing down Internet data across West, Central and
South Africa, a very real modern consequence.
Speaker 1: What triggers these things? Earthquakes, floods.
Speaker 2: It can be a range of things. Earthquakes are a
major trigger, yes, also powerful typhoons or hurricanes, extremely high tides,
major river floods, dumping lots of sediment, suddenly, even volcanic
eruptions near the coast. And worryingly, many of these triggers,
like extreme floods and storms, are becoming more frequent or
intense with climate change.
Speaker 1: And how often do they happen.
Speaker 2: It varies hugely. Canyons right off shore from major rivers
might see several smaller avalanches every year, but these giant
basin scale events like the Agadeer one might only happen
once every ten thousand years or even longer in a
particular system. But crucially, the size of the trigger doesn't
always predict the size of the avalanche. Well, the Big
Lisbon earthquake in seventeen fifty five only cause a tiny
underwater avalanche, But a magnitude seven point two earthquake off
Newfoundland in nineteen twenty nine triggered the largest recorded one.
It traveled that maybe forty two miles per hour, snapped
eleven seabed cables one after another, and even caused a
tsunami that killed twenty eight people on land.
Speaker 1: Wow. So how does scientists even study these things if
they're invisible and deep underwater.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly challenging, but researchers are getting clever. One team
in Liverpool used decades of survey data to reconstruct a
massive submarine avalanche, mapping this flow that was the size
of a skyscraper and traveled a distance like Liverpool to London.
It carved a trench one hundred feet deep and nine
miles wide and covered an area bigger than the UK
with sediment.
Speaker 1: That's incredible detective work and it's vice.
Speaker 2: We need to understand these events to protect those crucial
seafloor internet cables. There are over five hundred and fifty
active cables now totaling nearly eight hundred and seventy thousand miles,
carrying almost all international data.
Speaker 1: Traffic right the backbone of the Internet exactly.
Speaker 2: When the Taiwan earthquake hit in two thousand and six,
it triggered avalanches that cut numerous cables, causing massive Internet
outages like ninety to one hundred percent loss of traffic
in some parts of Southeast Asia. That's why researchers are
even using things like physical models pools, where they create
mini basins and simulate tribidity currents to see how they
flow and deposit sediment.
Speaker 1: Fascinating. Okay, from the deep ocean's power to Earth's fiery heart,
let's talk volcanoes, starting with these so called zombie volcanoes
like Udorunku and Bolivia, dormant for ages but now showing
signs of life.
Speaker 2: It's Runku is a great example. It's a strata volcano
that hasn't had a major eruption for about two hundred
and fifty thousand years, but for the last fifty years
or so it's been restless. There are gas emissions, small earthquakes,
and the ground around it is bulging upwards, rising maybe
four inches a year. Looks like a sombrero hat. Someone
described it.
Speaker 1: A bulging sombreros So does that mean it's about to blow?
Is there a big blob of magma moving up?
Speaker 2: That was the initial fear. Yeah, there's a known large
magma body deep underneath that whole region, the Altiplanta Puna
Magma Body or APMBB. People worried magma was rising from
it towards Uturunco.
Speaker 1: But more recent studies using data from thousands of small
earthquakes and analyzing rocks suggests something slightly different and maybe
less immediately alarming. It seems hot fluids and gases, mostly
steam and CO two, are rising from that deep magma
body through cracks like a chimney. Okay, these fluids get
trapped closer to the surface, causing the ground to swell
and triggering those small quakes. But it doesn't look like
significant amounts of magma are getting close to the surface,
at least not yet. So good news. Probably not an
imminent eruption.
Speaker 2: Probably not eminent. Yeah, but it definitely shows the volcano
is still alive and rumbling deep down. Domance certainly doesn't.
Speaker 1: Mean dead, no care and thinking about eruptions. Mount Tambora
in eighteen fifteen, its shadow still looms large that global
impact the year without a summer even inspiring Frankenstein, It's
hard to grasp how one eruption could do all that.
Speaker 2: Tambora was a truly catastrophic event on a planetary scale.
It ejected this absolutely colossal cloud of particles, mainly sulfur dioxide,
way up into the.
Speaker 1: Stratosphere and that acted like a shield.
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yes, the sulfur dioxide turned into tiny aerosol particles
that reflected sunlight back into space. This caused significant global
cooling the infamous year without a Summer in eighteen sixteen.
It led to massive crop failures, widespread food shortages, famine disease,
immense suffering across Europe and North America. It really shows
how interconnected the Earth system is.
Speaker 1: And it's the sulfur dioxide, the SO two that's the
key ingredient for that cooling effect.
Speaker 2: Primarily, yes, those tiny sulfate aerosol particles are very effective
at scattering sunlight. Mount Pinatuba's eruption in nineteen ninety one,
a much small event than Tambora, still lowered global average
temperatures by about half a degree celsius for a couple
of years. Tambora dropped global tempts by about one degree
fahrenheit maybe more regionally.
Speaker 1: But we shouldn't think of this volcanic cooling as a
good thing to offset global warming.
Speaker 2: Right, Absolutely not. It's a dangerous misconception. While it does
cool the planet temporarily, these sudden temperature shifts are devastating
for agriculture, as eighteen sixteen showed. They also mess up
rainfall patterns, often leading to drought in monsoon dependent regions
like parts of Africa and Asia.
Speaker 1: And there are feedback loops with climate change too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's complex. Some research suggests climate change might even
enhance the cooling effect of future eruptions. Changing air circulation
might make the aerosol smaller and more reflective. Conversely, climate
change itself melting ice caps, reducing pressure on volcanoes, increased rainfall,
interacting with magma systems could potentially trigger more eruptions. And
we haven't even mentioned the immediate.
Speaker 1: Dangers right for people living nearby.
Speaker 2: Exactly around eight hundred million people live within range of
activel canoes. A major eruption could obviously devastate cities with ashfall,
pyroclastic flows, lahars. The local impact is terrifying.
Speaker 1: Speaking of terrifying local impacts, can't be flee gray near Naples, Italy.
The Fields of Fire, a supervolcano system with twenty four craters.
The ancients thought it was a gateway to the underworld.
Speaker 2: And you can see why. It's this vast, restless volcanic
landscape right next to a major city. It's a constant
source of worry. Its biggest known eruption the Campanion Ignombrite,
about forty thousand years ago. It was enormous. It covered
huge parts of Europe and ash caused maybe seven degrees
fahrenheit of cooling, a volcanic winter that likely had a
huge impact on Neanderthal populations at the time.
Speaker 1: Did it wipe them out?
Speaker 2: That's debated. Some scientists think it might have significantly raisured them,
maybe even giving Homo sapiens a temporary advantage or reprieve
as they expanded into Europe. There was another nasty eruption
in fifteen thirty eight that created a whole new hill,
Montane Wuovo, right there in the bay.
Speaker 1: So what's happening there now? Is it active?
Speaker 2: The ground there is constantly moving, rising and falling. It's
called brady seism. Italian authorities raise the alert level to
yellow Back in twenty twelve because of increased activity, more
ground uplift, more small earthquakes. There was a noticeable four
point four magnitude quake just recently in March twenty twenty
five that definitely got people's attention.
Speaker 1: So should people be worried?
Speaker 2: Scientists are definitely concerned and monitoring it intensely. But importantly,
they say there are currently no signs of magma actually
moving towards the surface, which would be the key indicator
of an impending eruption. There's even a project, the Campy
Flegray Deep Drilling Project, trying to drill down almost two
miles to study the magma chamber directly. But the potential
threat to the million or so people living nearby is mense.
It's one of the highest risk volcanic areas in the
world and is not.
Speaker 1: The only one. Vesuvius is right there too, famous for
Pompeii right.
Speaker 2: Next door, and today three million people live in its shadow.
An eruption could send rock and ash flying at one
hundred millip are, potentially wiping out Naples.
Speaker 1: What about Papocatta Pedal in Mexico.
Speaker 2: Very active only forty miles from Mexico City twenty two
million people and thirty miles from Puebla six million. It's
been erupting pretty constantly since the early two thousands, mostly ashfall,
but a really big eruption could cover Mexico City in
eight inches of ash, causing chaos, blocking drains, disrupting water electricity,
plus the danger of pyroclastic flows.
Speaker 1: And Mount Saint Helen's here in the US.
Speaker 2: Still a threat, still active, yes, and expected to erupt again.
But the massive nineteen eighty eruption with that huge landslide
and sideways blast, actually created a deep crater that makes
another catastrophic sideways blast less likely.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Future eruptions are expected to be more conventional up through
the crater. Still dangerous, but perhaps not on the nineteen
eighty scale.
Speaker 1: Okay, Shifting from eruptions to the ground shaking itself. Yeah,
mega thrust earthquakes. These are the biggest ones where one
plate forces its way into another.
Speaker 2: That's right. These occurrent subduction zones and the most powerful
earthquakes the planet produces. The plates get locked, strain builds
up over centuries, and then bang, a massive release of
energy and crucially, when the seafloor suddenly thrusts upwards. During
one of these quakes, it displaces a huge amount.
Speaker 1: Of water, creating tsunamis.
Speaker 2: Exactly colossal tsunamis, sometimes called telesunamis that can travel across
entire ocean basins and devastate coastlines thousands of miles away.
Speaker 1: In Japan's nankitrov is a prime example of this danger zone,
authority is issue to make a quake advisory there recently.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Nankai Trough is where the Philippine Sea plate
is diving under Japan. It's a notorious zone. Based on
historical patterns, there were destructive quakes in nineteen forty four
and nineteen forty six. Scientists estimate there's a very high
probability maybe up to eighty percent, of a magnitude eight
or nine earthquake there within the next few decades. It's
a constant, looming threat they live with and prepare for.
Speaker 1: And closer to home on the US West Coast, there's
the Cascadia subduction Zone stretching from northern California up to
Vancouver Island. Test they're worried because it's been too quiet.
Speaker 2: Precisely, Cascadia has a history of massive earthquakes at least
thirty major ones in the last fourteen thousand years or so,
averaging about one every five hundred years. The last big
one was in seventeen hundred, so we're well within the
window for the next one. The long period of quiet
means the plates are locked tight, an immense strain is
building up.
Speaker 1: What could happen when it finally goes.
Speaker 2: A sudden release could cause a magnitude nine earthquake, potentially
lasting for five minutes. The shaking would be incredibly intense,
possibly causing liquefaction where the ground behaves like quicksand, and
it would generate a massive tsunami, maybe lasting ten hours,
inundating coastal communities. Experts have called it potentially the worst
natural disaster in US history. Could destroy over six hundred
thousand buildings, leave communities cut off for weeks.
Speaker 1: That's terrifying. Are there any warning signs? Smaller slips?
Speaker 2: They do detect slow slip events, that's where the plates
move very slowly over weeks or months, releasing a bit
of stress. It's not enough to prevent the big one,
but well, scientists, the fault is active and they're improving monitoring.
There's a ten million dollar project placing seismic sensors and
pressure gauges on a fiber optic cable off Oregon's coast
to listen more closely to the fault and hopefully provide
earlier warnings.
Speaker 1: Its race against time in Japan, dealing with fifteen hundred
noticeable quakes a year. So they've become experts in building resilience,
haven't they? Incredible engineering?
Speaker 2: They absolutely have. Living with that constant threat has forced
them to innovate. They have incredibly rigorous building toads. Since
the nineteen fifties, buildings had to withstand a magnitude seven
quake without collapsing. Since the eighties, the codes are even stricter.
Buildings should only have minor damage up to magnitude seven,
remain functional and not collapse even in stronger quakes.
Speaker 1: How do they achieve that?
Speaker 2: Lots of ways, thicker beams, pillars, walls. A key technology
is base isolation, putting buildings on giant rubber pads or
bearings that separate them from the grounds shaking. Another is
using dampers like giant shock absorbers, often filled with liquid,
installed between floors and skyscrapers. These absorb the quick's energy,
allowing the building to sway safely, maybe up to five
feet at the top.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Even really complex modern designs like the Tokyo Skytree Tower
incorporate sophisticated dampers, sometimes drawing inspiration from traditional designs like
the central pillar in ancient pagodas, which also help them
with stan earthquakes. It's an amazing blend of tradition and
cutting edge engineering.
Speaker 1: From the earth shaking to something almost ghostly in the
polar seas. Brincles, these fingers of death. Strange twisting ice
tubes forming.
Speaker 2: Underwater brinacles are truly otherworldly, elegant, eerie, twisting tubes of
ice reaching down from the sea ice towards the seafloor,
like something from a dream or maybe a nightmare for
small sea creatures.
Speaker 1: How do they form? What's the science?
Speaker 2: It starts when seawater freezes to form cs the ice
crystals exclude the salts. You get pockets of extremely cold,
super salty, dense brine trapped within the ice. Okay, super salty, right,
And because this brine is much colder and denser than
the surrounding seawater, which is just below freezing, it starts
to drip downwards out of cracks in the sea ice.
As the super coold brine falls, it freezes the slightly
warmer seawater it comes into contact.
Speaker 1: With, forming an ice tube around the dripping brine.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It creates this icy sheath, like an icicle, growing
downwards underwater. This sheath protects the flow of brine, allowing
the brinnacle to grow longer and thicker, sometimes several feet long,
reaching all the way to the seabed. It's this crazy
downward spiral of ice formation.
Speaker 1: And the fingers of death part they trap animals.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's where they get their ominous nickname. When the
tip of the brinnacle touches the seafloor, the supercold brine
doesn't just stop. It spreads outwards along the bottom. As
it spreads, it keeps freezing the surrounding water and anything
else it touches.
Speaker 1: Like starfish and sea urchins exactly.
Speaker 2: Small slow moving bottom dwellers like starfish and sea urchines
can get caught completely off guard. The ice spreads around them,
forming this kind of ice net or ice cage, trapping
them and freezing them solid, sometimes instantly. It's a brutal fate.
Speaker 1: Grim are They hard to film.
Speaker 2: Incredibly difficult, they're fragile, They form in very cold, remote locations.
The first time one was successfully filmed forming back in
twenty eleven was apparently a mix of careful planning and
sheer luck, but it gave us amazing insight into these
unique polar processes.
Speaker 1: But here's the twist. Scientists aren't just looking at them
as death traps. They're now wondering if brinacles could be
linked to the origin of life. How does that work?
Speaker 2: This is where it gets incredibly thought provoking. Think about
those tiny channels within the sea ice where the super
cold brine forms, or even within the brinacle itself. These
are tiny, confined spaces like natural test tubes, mini labs exactly,
mini labs where chemicals dissolved in the water can become
highly concentrated. The theory is that these confined salty environments
could provide the perfect conditions for complex chemical reactions to occur,
maybe allowing simple molecules to self assemble into more complex
ones like amino acids or other building blocks of life,
kind of like chemical gardens, fostering prebiotic chemistry.
Speaker 1: Wow, and this could be happening elsewhere.
Speaker 2: That's the really exciting implication. Scientists speculate that similar processes
could be happening right now on icy moons in our
Solar system, like Jupiter's moon Europa, or Saturn's moon's Ganymede
or Enceladus, which have subsurface oceans beneath icy shells.
Speaker 1: So Britnacles on other worlds could be creating life.
Speaker 2: It's a possibility they might be providing the initial chemical steps,
laying the foundations for life to emerge in these extreme environments.
It just shows how a seemingly simple, strange phenomenon here
on Earth can hint at profound answers to questions about
life's origins, both here and potentially far beyond.
Speaker 1: From icy origins to the mysteries of the deep ocean itself.
Sounds and submersibles. Let's start with sounds. For deck, Scientists
heard weird quacking in Antarctica.
Speaker 2: Bioduck Yeah, bioduc first recorded way back in nineteen sixty,
and there were similar but higher pitched sounds called biogoose
off Australia. For years, people thought they must be mechanical,
maybe sonar or something. They just didn't sound biologically. They
were eventually, Yes, they were identified as calls made by
mink whales. What was really interesting was that the signals
apparently never overlapped, which suggested they might be communicating, maybe
taking turns in a kind of conversation, a secret.
Speaker 1: Language talking whales. And didn't scientists recently try to actually
talk back to a whale?
Speaker 2: Yes? That was Project's CEI, a groundbreaking experiment by University
of California researchers. They played recorded humpback whale greeting calls
to a whale named Twain off the coast of Alaska.
Speaker 1: And did Twain respond amazingly?
Speaker 2: Yes, Twain responded thirty six times over about twenty minutes,
and apparently Twain even matched the intervals between calls, waiting
about ten seconds before answering, as if engaging in a deliberate,
polite exchange. It's early days, but it hints at the
potential for understanding, maybe even communicating with these intelligent creatures.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. What about other mystery sounds? The bloop that
sounded terrifying.
Speaker 2: The bloop was a huge one recorded in nineteen ninety
seven near Point Nemo in the South Pacific. That's the
spot in the Ocean for this from any land, a
real water desert. It was this incredibly powerful ultra low
frequency sound see bonds. That was the initial speculation, naturally,
but scientists later concluded it was almost certainly the sound
of massive icebergs cracking and breaking up. An ice quake.
Just shows the immense power involved in Antarctic ice dynamics.
Point Nemo, by the way, is also used as a
graveyard for old satellites. They deliberately crashed them.
Speaker 1: There a satellite cemetery in iceberg roars huh okay, But
one sound remains truly unexplained.
Speaker 2: Upsweep Upsweep is still a genuine puzzle, Recorded first in
nineteen ninety one in the Pacific. It's a series of
distinct rising tones repeated at intervals. Its intensity changes with
the seasons, peaking in spring and autumn. Is volcanic or
seismic origins have been pretty much rolled out. The best
guess is it's biological, maybe some kind of fish or
marine mammal communication or navigation signal. We haven't identified yet,
but honestly, nobody knows for sure. It remains one of
the Ocean's great unsolved acoustic mysteries.
Speaker 1: Okay, from sounds we can't explain to places we can't
easily see. Let's talk about the submarine RAN exploring under
Antarctica's ice shells.
Speaker 2: RAN was this amazing sleek autonomous underwater vehicle or AUV,
meticulously programmed to map the hidden world beneath Antarctica's massive
ice shelves, like the Dots and ice shelf. It was
like sending a probe to the dark side of the Moon,
revealing landscapes never seen before.
Speaker 1: And what did it find down there? Using it sonar?
Speaker 2: It used advanced sonar like bats or dolphins to build
detailed three D maps, and it found a surprisingly rugged
and dynamic environment beneath the ice, huge channels carved by meltwater,
ridges that look like sand dunes formed by currents. And
these strange swirling, tear drop shaped patterns on the seabed
over thirteen hundred feet long.
Speaker 1: Tear drop patterns? What caused those?
Speaker 2: They think They're shaped by the complex interaction of warm
ocean water melting the base of the ice shelf and
the coriolas effect the spin of the Earth influencing water flow.
These patterns told a story of how and where the
ice was melting fastest, giving crucial data on accelerating ice.
Speaker 1: Loss, and rand's final mission was to the Thwaits Glacier,
the doomsday glacier.
Speaker 2: Yes, Thwaites is critically important because it's melting fast and
has the potential if it collapses entirely, to raise global
sea levels significantly. RAN had mapped parts of it before,
and this final mission was to gather more data on
how warm ocean water was getting underneath it and driving
the melting high risk, high rewards science. But then it
vanished tragically, Yes, early in twenty twenty four, while exploring
deep beneath Waits. We're talking depths between six hundred and
fifty and one thousand, six hundred and fifty feet under
fifteen hundred feet of solid ice, RAN just disappeared, no warning,
no distress signal.
Speaker 1: Just gone. And they know what happened.
Speaker 2: No, they still don't know for sure. It could have
gotten trapped in a crevasse under the ice, caught in
an unexpectedly strong current, collided with the seabed. It's incredibly
difficult terrain. But despite the loss, the data RAN collected
over its forty plus missions is invaluable. A treasure trow
if they called it about glacial meult in. These hidden
subglacial worlds.
Speaker 1: A poignant reminder of the challenges, and it connects back
to Antarctica's deeper past too, right. Finding rainforests under the
ice exactly.
Speaker 2: Discoveries like finding fossilized roots, pollen, and spores from a
ninety million year old temperate rainforest near the South Pole
just completely reshape our view. They show an Antarctica that
was once warm, green, and teeming with life when the
continent was in a different position and global climate was
much warmer. It forces us to rethink Earth's climate history.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's shift from the deep past and deep ocean
to some weird human const r excent alignments on the surface.
The International Date Line, for instance, how can crossing an
imaginary line add or subtract a whole day?
Speaker 2: The IDL is purely a human convention designed to handle
the fact that if you travel all the way around
the world, you need to adjust the calendar somewhere. Crossing
it eastward, you repeat a day or subtract twenty four hours.
Crossing it westward, you skip a day, add twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: Like Taylor Swift flying from La to Tokyo for her tour.
She left on February tenth, flew for twelve hours, but
landed on February eleventh in the afternoon, effectively losing almost
a day to the time zones and the dateline.
Speaker 2: Crossing exactly or flying the other way, you could potentially
leave on a Tuesday and arrive on Monday. It messes with.
Speaker 1: Your head, and the line itself isn't straight, is it.
It's this crazy zigzag.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's completely absurd. Looking on a map. It has
to wiggle around islands and land masses to avoid splitting
a single country or island group into two different calendar days.
Speaker 1: Like those Diomede Islands between Alaska and Russia.
Speaker 2: Perfect example, Big Diamede, Russia and Little Diomede, USA are
just two point five miles apart, but they're twenty one
hours apart in time. Because the dateline runs right between them,
you can practically see yesterday from today. That's nuts, and
countries have even moved the line. Curebody, a nation of
islands spread across a huge area of the Pacific, decided
in nineteen ninety four to just skip Saturday, December thirty first,
entirely shifting the line eastwards, so their whole country would
be on the same side and conveniently be the first
place to see the new millennium. The line also detours
around the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.
Speaker 1: It's all arbitrary, so it was just decided at a conference.
Speaker 2: Pretty much. The eighteen eighty four International Meridian Conference in Washington,
d C. Established Greenwich, England as the prime meridian zero
degrees longitude and put the IDL roughly opposite it at
one hundred and eighty degrees longitude, But its exact path
is based on political and practical convenience, not nature, just
like time zones themselves. India, for example, spans a huge
east west distance but uses just one time zone.
Speaker 1: Okay, from imaginary lines to possibly real but weird energy spots,
These vile vortices twelve creepy places around the globe where
strange things supposedly happened.
Speaker 2: This is a more fringe concept proposed by researcher Ivan Sanderson.
He identified twelve areas, mostly clustered around the tropics of
Cancer and Capricorn, plus the North and South poles, where
he believed anomalous events, disappearances, magnetic irregularities, strange phenomena seemed
to concentrate the.
Speaker 1: Bermuda Triangles, the most famous one August.
Speaker 2: Way Right, the poster child for vile vortices, known for
dozens of unexplained ship and plane disappearances. But Sanderson identified
others too, like what Mahenjo Daro in Pakistan, that ancient
Indus valley city mysteriously abandoned around seventeen hundred BCE Easter
Island with its enigmatic giant Moi statues. How were they moved?
Why were they built? The Dragon's Triangle south of Japan
another zone known for disappearances, even places like Great Zimbabwe
in Africa mysteriously abandoned than the fifteenth century, and the.
Speaker 1: South Atlantic Anomaly where radiation is weird.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's a known scientific phenomenon. It's an area where
Earth's inner radiation belt dips closer to the surface. It
does affect satellites, computers can glitch, astronauts report seeing flashes
of light. The International Space Station needs extra shielding when
passing through it. Sanderson included this and places like the
Wharton Basin and the Indian Ocean known for unusual earthquakes,
and even the North and South Poles themselves associated with
disappearance stories in extreme condition.
Speaker 1: Okay, so a collection of mystery spots. But what's the
really weird part about this theory?
Speaker 2: The weirdest claim is that if you connect these twelve
points on a globe, they supposedly form the vertices of
an icosahedron, a twenty sided geometric shape and nicosahedron.
Speaker 1: Seriously, that's the claim.
Speaker 2: Is it a massive coincidence, a result of confirmation bias,
just picking spots that fit a pattern, or does it
hint at some underlying geometric energy grid on Earth? It's
definitely out there, but it's an intriguing idea that captures
the imagining.
Speaker 1: Definitely intriguing. Okay, let's wrap this section with a thought experiment.
What if we drained the oceans. Imagine the Atlantic just vanished.
Speaker 2: It's a dramatic way to think about how much water
there is and what's hidden beneath it. The Atlantic covers
a fifth of the Earth's surface. Ninety seven percent of
all Earth's water is salty ocean.
Speaker 1: Water, and life depends on it utterly completely.
Speaker 2: Without the ocean's Earth becomes a desert, a giant dust bowl,
no water cycle, no rain, rampant fires, no drinking water,
oceans regulate temperature. Without them, the equator would scorch. They
are absolutely essential for life.
Speaker 1: As we know it, so if we could drain them,
what hidden landscape would appear?
Speaker 2: We'd see that the topography beneath the waves is actually
far more extreme, more dramatic than most of the land surface,
like Monokia exactly Monochia in Hawaii. Measured from its base
on the ocean floor. It's the tallest mountain on Earth
thirty three thousand, five hundred feet, nearly a mile taller
than Mount Everest, but most of it is underwater.
Speaker 1: In the Mid Atlantic Ridge.
Speaker 2: The largest single geological feature on the planet, almost entirely submerged.
This underwater mountain range runs down the center.
Speaker 1: Of the Atlantic.
Speaker 2: It's about half the height of Mount Kilimanjaro and stretches
for tens of thousands of miles, about a tenth of
the Earth's circumference. We only see tiny bits of it
poking out, like an Iceland or the Azores. It wasn't
even properly mapped until the nineteen fifties. Shows how much
ocean is unexplored.
Speaker 1: And that Ridge is where new ocean floor is being
created right. Plate tectonics in.
Speaker 2: Action precisely, it's a divergent boundary where the North American
and Eurasian plates and the South American and African plates
further south are pulling apart. Magma wells up, creates new
crust and pushes the continents apart by about one point
five inches a year. It's the engine driving the Atlantic
Ocean's widening, will.
Speaker 1: The Pacific is closing, leading to that amaggious super continent
idea in the future.
Speaker 2: That's the projection. As the Atlantic widens, the Pacific is
generally shrinking, with subduction zones around its rim. The model
suggests that in maybe fifty million years or so, the
Pacific could close entirely, with the Americas eventually colliding with
Asia clustering around the North Pole to form a mesia.
The constant opening and closing of ocean basins amazing.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move into our final section, looking at the
human and ecological footprint on this dynamic planet. Starting with
barriers people build, like the Dingo fence in Australia three thousand,
one hundred miles long.
Speaker 2: That's immense, It's truly colossal, longer than the distance from
London to New York, stretching across three states from Queensland
down to South Australia. Just this massive wire mesh fence
about six feet tall, sometimes with an electric wire, built
primarily to keep dingoes, Australia's largest native land predator, out
of the southeastern sheep farming regions.
Speaker 1: And it needs a full time staff just to maintain it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, about twenty people constantly patrolling, repairing damage from weather,
animals trying to get through. Costs about seven hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a year just for upkeep. It's a
huge ongoing effort.
Speaker 1: But these kinds of interventions, trying to control nature on
such as scale, they often have unexp consequences, don't there?
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely. The dingo fence is a classic example of
complex unintended ecological impacts. By removing the apex predator, the dingo,
from inside the.
Speaker 1: Fence, kangaroo numbers went up exactly.
Speaker 2: Kangaroo populations exploded, which meant more competition with sheep for
grazing land. This overgrazing then led to less diversity in
plants and fewer small animals, which in turn affected.
Speaker 1: Soil quality a whole cascade effect totally.
Speaker 2: The fence also blocks the migration routes of other animals,
affects how seeds are dispersed, even changes how sand dunes
form and move. And interestingly, researchers found that kangaroos inside
the fence tended to be smaller and lighter, while those
outside the fence, still facing dingo predators, had bigger feet
and heads, not because of diet, but because of different
evolutionary pressures. It just shows how interconnected.
Speaker 1: Everything is in Australia has a history with problematic fences.
Speaker 2: Thinking back to the rabbits ah Yes, the Great rabbit
Plague started by one guy, Thomas Austen, releasing just twenty
four rabbits for hunting in eighteen fifty nine with no
natural predators. They bred like well. Rabbits completely devastated huge areas.
Speaker 1: Of farmland, and they built fences to stop them.
Speaker 2: They built three massive rabbit proof fences. The first one
was over two thousand miles long, the longest fence in
the world at the time, but ultimately they didn't work.
The rabbits always found ways over, under, or through them.
A stark lesson in the difficulty of controlling invasive species
once they're established.
Speaker 1: Wow, are there other weird fences out there? The notes
mentioned an aquarium fence.
Speaker 2: Ha ha ha. Yes, apparently someone in Turkey built a one
hundred and sixty four foot long aquarium as the fence
around their luxury villa, filled with diverse marine life, connected
to the agency by a long pipeline, gives them an
ocean view from their garden. I suppose secured by facial
recognition cameras.
Speaker 1: Naturally, that's certainly unique. And a bra fence in New Zealand.
Speaker 2: That one sounds more accidental. Apparently, back in nineteen ninety nine,
some bras mysteriously appeared on a rural fence in central Otago.
Then more appears, and it just grew and grew into
this quirky tourist attraction. Eventually it caused traffic problems because
so many people stop to look or add to it.
Speaker 1: Okay, from weird fences to a weird population mystery. Tasmania.
It's the big island, twenty sixth largest in the world,
beautiful nature, cool climate, yet it's Australia's least populated state.
Speaker 2: Why it is a paradox. Tasmania is about the size
of Ireland or Switzerland stunningly beautiful in many parts, but
has just over half a million people, much less dense
than mainland Australia. It's definitely an enigma.
Speaker 1: Did the ghost stories play a role? Port Arthur Prison
haunted houses?
Speaker 2: Well, Tasmania certainly plays up at sinister past and creepy atmosphere.
You've got Port Arthur, the brutal former convict prison now
a tourist site with ghost tours. Franklin House, an oldest
state rumored to have moving objects in weird noises, Hobart Prison,
more ghost tours, Richmond Bridge supposedly haunted by a cruel
guard pushed off by convicts. These stories at a certain character,
for sure.
Speaker 1: But they're not the real reason people don't move there intros.
Speaker 2: No, the real reasons are much more practical and frankly
quite challenging for residents. They paint a picture that's far
from the idyllic tourist brossures.
Speaker 1: Like, what what are the big issues?
Speaker 2: Okay, First, apparently the internet connection is notoriously weak and unreliable.
That's a huge drawback in the modern world, especially for
remote work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, crucial.
Speaker 2: Then there are logistical difficulties being an island separated by
the base Strait means higher prices for goods, longer delivery times.
The cost of living is high, congent, generally rising rents,
expensive food and basics. Care a major issue, long waiting
lists for many procedures in the public hospitals. People often
have to travel to the mainland, which is expensive for specialized.
Speaker 1: Care and jobs opportunities.
Speaker 2: That's another big one. Tasmania has an aging population and
many young people leave because there are limited career opportunities,
lower salaries compared to the mainland, and relatively high unemployment.
So despite the natural beauty, there are significant hers to
living there comfortably.
Speaker 1: That paints a very different picture. But it does have
incredible natural assets right World Heritage Sites.
Speaker 2: We absolutely nearly a quarter of Tasmania is World Heritage listed.
It has these amazing ancient, cool temperate rainforests, incredibly rich
archaeological sites showing human presence going back twenty thousand years,
unique wildlife and plants like the Centurion tree, this massive
eucalyptus four hundred years old, over three hundred and thirty
feet tall. It offers incredible peace, calm and unique nature.
Speaker 1: So it's a trade off.
Speaker 2: It really is. It forces you to ask, as a listener,
might would you live there? Knowing the beauty but also
the challenges. The hope is that Tasmania can find ways
to improve its economy and opportunities to keep its young
people while still protecting its incredible natural heritage. Finding that balance.
Speaker 1: What a journey we've taken across vanished continents, deep into
the earth core, exploring ocean depths, even glimpsing the future.
It feels like the common thread is just this constant,
restless dam of our dynamic Earth.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, from those ancient magnetic whispers in the rocks to
the strange sounds and the deep ocean, our planet is
just brimming with hidden knowledge, layers upon layers of stories waiting.
Speaker 1: To be uncovered. And we've heard how questions that seemed
impossible are actually being answered, how new tech keeps revealing
wonders we barely imagined.
Speaker 2: The Earth really isn't just a static stage. It's alive,
constantly reshaping itself, leaving these fascinating cludes and presenting us
with these incredible challenges, but also opportunities for discovery. Every
lost plate, every hidden mountain range, every powerful earthquake, every
weird sound. They're all part of this grand, ongoing story
of our planet.
Speaker 1: It really makes you think about the ground beneath your feet.
Speaker 2: Differently, and the vast oceans we still know so little about.
It reveals this profound interconnectedness of everything.
Speaker 1: So the final question, then, what's next? What incredible new
lost piece of our planet, What unimaginable phenomenon are Maybe
what profound secret about life itself is just waiting out
there to be discovered.
Speaker 2: It makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: Maybe the most thrilling journey isn't to some distant star,
but right here beneath our feet, we're deep in our
own oceans. Keep asking questions, keep being curious, because this
deep dive into Earth's mysteries, it feels like it's only
just beginning