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Can you guess what this is?
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What if I told you there's a place where the creatures are made of glass?
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Or that there are life-forms that are invisible to us,
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but astronauts see them all the time?
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These invisible glass creatures aren't aliens on a faraway exoplanet.
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They're diatoms:
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photosynthetic, single-celled algae responsible for producing oxygen
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and helping seed clouds on a planetary scale
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and with intricately sculpted, geometric exoskeletons made of --
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yeah, glass.
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You can see them in swirls of ocean-surface colors from space.
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And when they die,
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their glass houses sink to the depths of the oceans,
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taking carbon out of the air
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and with them to the grave,
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accounting for a significant amount of carbon sequestration in the oceans.
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We live on an alien planet.
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There is so much weird life here on Earth to study,
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and so much of it lives at the edges of our world,
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of our sight and of our understanding.
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One of those edges is Antarctica.
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Typically, when we think about Antarctica,
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we think of a place that's barren and lifeless ...
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except for a few penguins.
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But Antarctica should instead be known as a polar oasis of life,
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host to countless creatures that are utterly fascinating.
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So why haven't we seen them on the latest nature documentary?
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Well, they lurk beneath the snow and ice,
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virtually invisible to us.
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They're microbes:
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tiny plants and animals living embedded inside of glaciers,
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underneath the sea ice
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and swimming in subglacial ponds.
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And they're no less charismatic than any of the megafauna
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that you're used to seeing in a nature documentary.
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But how do you compel people to explore what they can't see?
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I recently led a five-week expedition to Antarctica
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to essentially become a wildlife filmmaker at the microbial scale.
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With 185 pounds of gear,
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I boarded a military aircraft
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and brought microscopes into the field
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to film and investigate these microscopic extremophiles,
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so that we can become more familiar with a poorly understood ecosystem
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that we live with here on Earth.
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To film these invisible creatures in action,
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I needed to see where they call home --
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I needed to venture under the ice.
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Every year, the sea ice nearly doubles the entire size of Antarctica.
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To get a glimpse below the nine-feet-thick ice,
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I climbed down a long, metal tube inserted into the sea ice
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to witness a hidden ecosystem full of life,
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while being suspended between the seafloor and the illuminated ceiling of ice.
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Here's what that looked like from the outside.
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It was just absolutely magical.
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Some of the critters I found were delightful things like seed shrimp
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and many more beautiful, geometric diatoms.
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I then went farther afield to camp out in the Dry Valleys
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for a couple of weeks.
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98 percent of Antarctica is covered with ice
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and the Dry Valleys are the largest area of Antarctica where you can actually see
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what the continent itself looks like underneath all of it.
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I sampled bacteria at Blood Falls,
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a natural phenomenon of a subglacial pond spurting out iron oxide
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that was thought to be utterly lifeless until a little more than a decade ago.
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And I hiked up a glacier to drill down into it,
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revealing countless, hardcore critters living their best lives
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while embedded inside layers of ice.
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Known as cryoconite holes,
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they form when tiny pieces of darkly colored dirt
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get blown onto the glacier
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and begin to melt down into soupy holes that then freeze over,
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preserving hundreds of dirt pucks inside the glacier,
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like little island universes
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each with its own unique ecosystem.
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Some of the critters I found you may recognize,
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like this adorable tardigrade --
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I absolutely love them,
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they're like little gummy bears with claws.
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Also known as a water bear,
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they're famous for possessing superpowers
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that allow them to survive in extreme conditions,
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including the vacuum of space.
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But you don't need to travel to space or even Antarctica to find them.
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They live in moss all over this planet,
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from sidewalk cracks to parks.
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You likely walk right by tons of these invisible animals every day.
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Others may look familiar,
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but be stranger still, like nematodes.
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Not a snake nor an earthworm,
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nematodes are a creature all of their own.
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They can't regenerate like an earthworm or crawl like a snake,
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but they have tiny, dagger-like needles inside their mouths
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that some of them use to spearfish their prey and suck out the insides.
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For every single human on this planet,
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there exist 57 billion nematodes.
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And some of the critters you may not recognize at all
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but live out equally fascinating lives,
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such as rotifers with amazing crowns that turn into Roomba-like mouths,
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ciliates with digestive systems so transparent that it's almost TMI,
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and cyanobacteria that look like party confetti exploded all over a petri dish.
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A lot of times what we see in popular media
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are scanning electron microscope images of microorganisms
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looking like scary monsters.
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Without seeing them move their lives remain elusive to us
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despite them living nearly everywhere we step outside.
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What's their daily life like?
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How do they interact with their environment?
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If you only ever saw a photo of a penguin at a zoo,
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but you never saw one waddle around and then glide over ice,
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you wouldn't fully understand penguins.
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By seeing microcreatures in motion,
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we gain better insights into the lives of the otherwise invisible.
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Without documenting the invisible life in Antarctica and our own backyards,
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we don't understand just how many creatures we share our world with.
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And that means we don't yet have the full picture
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of our weird and whimsical home planet.
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Thank you.
