Name: What's Hidden Under the Jungles of New Guinea?
Uploaded: 2025-12-24T16:57:32.000Z
Duration: 42 min 20 s
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This is New guinea, the most fascinating and mysterious island in the world, because it's located very near to the equator.

Adverbs of degree

Most two dimensional world maps based on the Mercator projection warp New Guinea's size and make it appear a lot smaller than it really is.

Adverbs of manner

In reality, New guinea is the second largest island in the world, only behind Greenland and only just.

If you placed Greenland directly over New guinea, you'd see that they're actually almost the same size.

Despite our popular perceptions thinking otherwise.

Placed over Europe, New guinea is roughly triple the size of Great Britain and would extend from England and northern France nearly across the continent, through Romania to the Black Sea.

Or placed over America, it would stretch from the edge of Long island in New York State all the way down to Texas and nearly hit the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex.

New guinea is a way more enormous place than most outsiders think it is.

And it's also a way more unknown place than you probably think it is as well.

As much as 80% of New Guinea's territory is covered by dense rainforest, making it the third largest rainforest on the planet, behind only the Amazon and Congo rainforests that are on actual continents.

Which is why some people have taken to calling the New guinea rainforest the Second Amazon.

And if that wasn't enough, New guinea is also extremely mountainous.

The chain of mountains running through the center of the island, known as the New Guinea Highlands, are roughly the same size, elevation and scale as the Rocky Mountains are in North America.

And they feature the highest elevated peaks anywhere between the Himalayas in Asia and the Andes in South America.

They are by far the highest and most imposing mountains found on any island in the world.

And because of this harsh geography of dense rainforest combined with towering mountains, there is still a ton of territory hidden there that has remained unexplored and uncharted to this very day, deep into the 21st century.

And like we're seeing beneath the Amazon right now, there are some incredible new discoveries taking place here right now.

And there's a lot of things down there beneath a rainforest canopy that you probably won't expect, like, for example, glaciers, which probably are the first thing that you associate with tropical rainforests in New Guinea.

And yet, on the western side of the island that's under the control of Indonesia, exist the increasingly small remnants of ancient glaciers that have been continually shrinking since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The nearby mountain of them, called Punchak Jaya, contains the highest elevated point on the island at 4,884 meters, or 6,024ft above sea level, which is also the highest point on any island in the world.

It's high enough that temperatures plummet the further up it you go, which transforms New Guinea's abundant rainfall in a snow which has compacted down the mountain face into the glacier below it for at least the past several thousand years.

The New guinea glaciers are one of only a handful of so called tropical glaciers that can be found in the world, and

they're so remote and not well known that even some Indonesians aren't aware that their country actually contains them.

The New guinea glaciers were first spotted by Westerners in 1623 by a Dutch explorer called Jan Karstens.

But his account of snow and glaciers up on a mountain so near to the equator brought him nothing but ridicule from his contemporaries, and

hardly anybody believed him for centuries.

The existence of the glaciers in New guinea that he claimed to see weren't verified by Western science for nearly 300 years after Karsten's first observation, when Dutch expeditions between 1909 and 1913 in the early 20th century finally confirmed them.

And unfortunately, they probably won't exist for very much longer.

We now know that back in 1850, the area of the New guinea glacier stood at about 19.3 square kilometers, and

they were photographed extensively by airplane in 1936.

But by 1972, the glacier's area had already shrunk by nearly 2 2/3 from its 1850 size, and

airplane photographs captured the noticeable decline from the 1936 levels.

By 2018, the glaciers had shrunk by more than 97% from their 1850 levels, and

just half a square kilometer of their area still remained intact.

Their rapid decline in our modern times has been captured in satellite images like this one taken in 1988, this one taken in 2017, and

this one taken in 2020, showing hardly any trace of them still remaining.

The most recent scientific study conducted into the glacier's size was published in March of 2025 and was based on 2024 data.

And it showed that just 0.165 square kilometers of the glaciers still survive a 67% decline just from a few years previously in 2018.

If the current decline rate of the glaciers here continue, they're expected to be irreplaceably gone forever by the end of this decade, sometime around 2030.

And New guinea and Indonesia will no longer have any glaciers for the first time in tens of thousands of years.

And it won't be the first major geographic alteration that has happened in New Guinea.

In fact, back during the last ice age, when sea levels were significantly lower, New guinea used to be directly connected to Australia by land in a larger continent that we've since called Sahul.

Geologically speaking, New guinea is located on the Australian tectonic plate instead of the Eurasian plate, making it more connected to Australia from a geologic perspective than any of the islands to its west.

And why New guinea is classified as being a part of Oceania rather than Asia.

New guinea and Australia were intermittently connected by land to each other for millions of years, and

they only became separated due to rising sea levels around 8, 10,000 years ago, basically seconds ago in geologic time.

Which is why there is a significant amount of overlap in the animal species between both places today, like their prevalence in marsupials.

And why there's some speculation that animals that are currently extinct in Australia might continue existing somewhere in the deep, remote and unexplored parts of the New guinea interior.

New guinea is second only to the Amazon for the rate of new species that are still being discovered and described by modern science.

Literally thousands of new species have been formally described by researchers in New guinea just since 2010.

Though the vast majority of those new species have been small organisms like plants, insects and spiders, larger discoveries of previously unknown or lost mammals are a lot rarer, but

As recently as 2025, a biologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences captured the first ever photographs of the subalpine woolly rat living in its natural environment in the mountainous New guinea highlands.

A massive fluffy rodent measuring more than two and a half feet long and weighing more than four pounds that had previously only been known to scientists because of a handful of museum specimens clearly illustrating how relatively large species in New guinea can continue remaining elusive in the dense mountainous jungle.

Another notable recent example of a major discovery of a large animal like this in New guinea is the Wonduoi Tree kangaroo, a large 20 pound tree dwelling kangaroo like marsupial that was discovered on the island in the 1930s but was then never seen again for decades and eventually classified as extinct, only to suddenly become spotted again by a researcher in 2018 who captured the first ever photograph of one alive and well in the wild.

And even more recently came the rediscovery of Edinburgh's long beaked Echidon New Guinea.

This unique looking echidna was first collected and described in New guinea in 1961 and was entirely known by just a single specimen of a dead one that happened to be found back then, and

it was kept under lock and key for decades in the Naturalis Biodiversity center in the Netherlands.

Decades later, after it was found in 1998.

Researchers realized that it was a wholly unique species of Echidna, and

it was generally regarded to be extinct, since no other example of one had ever been encountered.

That is, until just a few years ago in 2023, when a team of researchers successfully recorded the first ever confirmed video footage of a live one in the Cyclops Mountains region of northern New guinea, pulling it out of the list of extinct species in the process.

And to give you just a taste of how brutal the environment can be in New guinea for these researchers, one of the expedition members fell through a moss pit into a previously unknown cave complex during the search and broke his arm in two places, but

discovered half a dozen new species of blind harvest mice, spiders and scorpions down there in the process, while another researcher reportedly had a leech stuck to his eyeball for three whole days.

But based on these two examples of large and previously believed extinct animals showing up again in New guinea decades later in 2018-2023, there is a chance that others might be waiting to be rediscovered somewhere out there, too.

And none is a more tantalizing possibility than the thylacine, more commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger.

The thylacine was a large carnivorous marsupial predator that served a similar ecological niche as canids, like dogs and wolves, did elsewhere on other continents.

Though they were completely biologically unrelated to them, they were among the largest carnivorous marsupials to ever exist.

And they were most well known for their impressive ability to open their jaws to an unusual extent, extent up to about 80 degrees.

The thylacine once had a range that spanned all across the ancient Sahul continent, when New guinea and Australia were all connected.

They're believed to have gone extinct in New guinea and Australia around 3200 years ago, at about the same time as the introduction of the dingo.

But as the dingo never made it all the way down south to the island of Tasmania, the thylacine continued surviving there in robust numbers until the modern era of European colonization.

The European settlers in Tasmania treated the thylacine as an unwanted pest that attacked their livestock.

And so the government introduced a bounty hunting program on the species that rapidly eliminated their numbers and drove them into extinction.

The last known living thylacine died in 1936 at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.

And ever since then, no confirmed sighting of another one has ever been made.

And the species was formally declared to be extinct decades ago in 1982.

But nonetheless, because New guinea is so massive, because it's such a hard place to properly explore due to the rainforests and mountains, because it's so rural and underdeveloped, because we know the thylacine's range once extended across the island, and

because we have very recent examples, like the Wandiwoi tree kangaroo in Edinburgh's long beaked echidna, turning back up alive there decades after they were declared to be extinct.

This there is a remote chance that if the thylacine was ever going to be rediscovered again, it would probably be somewhere hidden in New Guinea.

And that is far from the only unknown thing on the island that could be hidden from us.

New guinea is, politically speaking, divided roughly in half today between western New guinea under the control of Indonesia, and

Papua New guinea in the east, a separate and independent country.

And Papua New guinea is, bizarrely, the only country in the world today that has a completely unknown population, as in, nobody really knows how many people are actually living there.

As of the country's most recent national census that was conducted in 2024, the official population stands at 10.18 million.

But that census has been highly criticized as being inaccurate due to numerous issues that accompanied it, like incomplete coverage, missing forms, a warehouse containing material that caught on fire in the middle of it, and

serious logistical problems with accessing some of the most remote population centers in the country.

Only about 13% of Papua New Guinea's population are estimated to live in cities today, by far the lowest urbanization rate of any country today in the 21st century.

Most of the country's population lives across the interior of the country in rugged, difficult to access areas that can often only be reached by airplane or helicopter, making conducting an accurate census probably harder than in any other country on the planet.

The 2024 census and the last census before that in 2011 have both both been widely criticized as being unreliable and inaccurate.

And the last census they conducted that actually was considered to be reliable was all the way back in 2000, more than a quarter of a century ago now.

And While the official 2024 census estimates the country's population at 10.18 million, a separate study conducted by the UN and funded by Australia in 2022 that based itself on satellite data and analysis concluded that the population was probably closer to around 17 million people in reality, a huge difference in the official census that possibly undercounted the population by nearly 6 million people.

There's no conclusive agreement on any of these numbers, but

it's absolutely mind blowing to me that a country in the 21st century can still be potentially unaware of the existence of millions of people within its own territory, like to the point where Papua New guinea might not even be aware of the existence of about 50, 40% of its actual population.

Interestingly, there also appears to be a major difference in population between the eastern and western halves of the island.

Papua New Guinea's population could be either about 10 or 17 million people today, depending on which study you want to use, while West New Guinea's officially cited population is only around 5.5 million, potentially less than a third of the population in the east, despite their areas being similar.

And this can mostly be explained by the differences in the geography between the two halves.

In more temperate parts of the world, population densities are usually higher in flat lowland environments.

But the opposite is most often the case in tropical parts of the world, where the lowlands are covered by dangerous hostile rainforests and where the mountains have more mild temperatures and less dangerous diseases and wildlife that allow for denser human habitation and agriculture.