Name: What's Hidden Under the Ice of Antarctica?
Uploaded: 2026-03-09T17:21:58.000Z
Duration: 37 min 54 s
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Antarctica is easily the least understood and the most mysterious of all Earth's continents in the 21st century.

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It's such a poorly understood place that most people alive today still don't even really have a solid grasp about Antarctica's true size or shape.

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Something that's probably not really helped by our perception of Antarctica as this sprawling, misshapen blob that we always see stretching across the bottom of our two dimensional maps, if it's even displayed on the map at all.

In reality, Antarctica is the world's fifth largest continent.

It's exceeding the sizes of Australia and Europe, and

being closer in size to South America than any other continent.

The true scale of Antarctica can be revealed when overlaying it atop a continent that we're more familiar with.

Like North America, Antarctica is significantly larger than the mainland continental 48 US states.

While the distance from the Antarctic Peninsula to the other side of the continent is as far as the Canadian Arctic Islands are to Mexico and placed over Europe, Antarctica would stretch from the far northern reaches of Norway and Finland down to Iran and Iraq in the southeast, and

well past Ireland into the Mid Atlantic to the west.

It's a genuinely massive place, and it's also almost completely empty and absent from human life.

The human population of Antarctica ranges from as many as 4,000 people during the warmer Antarctic summer months to as few as only a thousand people during the long, dark and savagely cold Antarctic winters, when the darkness of night envelops the entire continent for months straight and the temperatures plummet beneath -34 degrees Celsius continent wide.

But it's not just the brutal weather of Antarctica that keeps its population low.

It's also just an insanely remote place that's really difficult to get yourself to.

It's located down at the bottom of the globe, and

the closest large human settlement to the continent is Ushuaia in far southern Argentina, which is still about 1,000 km away from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Despite this closeness, however, the distance between Ushuaia and Antarctica is separated by the infamous Drake Passage, an expanse of water that is perhaps the roughest and most dangerous part of the world's oceans.

Here at the bottom of the civilizational world between the continents, the Southern and Pacific oceans flow unobstructed into the Atlantic, representing the only location in the Southern Hemisphere where winds and ocean currents can each flow around the entire world without any obstruction from land, allowing them to violently whip around the world continually and keep picking up speed and strength as they go.

This, combined with a collision of warmer water in the north and colder water in the south result in powerful waves in the Drake Passage that can climb up to nearly 20 meters, or 65ft high during extreme weather scenarios.

With the rough conditions through the Drake Passage and the vast distances between Antarctica and the other nearby continents of Africa and Australia, it's no wonder that human eyes most likely never even saw the frozen continent at all until the 19th century, when a Russian ship made the first ever recorded discovery of Antarctica in 1820.

Even today, more than two centuries later, we still understand precious little about this isolated continent, especially anything about what's possibly beneath the titanic Antarctic ice sheet.

Ice covers more than 98% of the Antarctic continent's surface, leaving very few exposed areas of land above the ice that we can actually observe with our own eyes.

On average, across the entire continent, the Antarctic ice sheet stretches more than 2km thick.

From the surface, we can observe down to the surface of the actual continental landmass.

But at its thickest points, the ice on Antarctica can reach upwards of nearly 5km thick, which is nearly as thick as 6 of the Burj Khalifas in Dubai, the world's tallest building, all stacked on top of each other.

This is why 61% of all the freshwater on the planet is locked away in Antarctica's ice sheet.

And if the entire thing melted away into its liquid form, it would probably end up raising global sea levels by around 60 meters, which would be enormously catastrophic and result in the total obliteration of Florida and Most of the U.S.

The ice sheet of Antarctica is so thick and impenetrable that it's widely accepted that we know more about the surface of faraway worlds like Mars today than what's actually beneath the Antarctic ice sheet on the real surface of Antarctica.

Rather than drilling through kilometers of ice to see what's beneath it, the primary way that we've been able to sort of visualize what's beneath the ice on the continent is, is by flying planes over it and shooting radio waves down into the ice below and then analyzing how the waves echo back up to the plane, a process that's known as radio echo sounding.

But the Antarctic continent is of course, a much larger place than even Europe is, and

so flying planes doing this technique over the entire continent would be a brutally painstaking, expensive and time consuming process.

So as it stands now, we only have a limited idea of what's beneath the frozen continent based on the few radio echo sounding flights we've actually done across it so far.

And it's estimated that more than 90% of the continent beneath the ice remains unmapped and unknown.

But the small amount of information we already do know about what's beneath the world's largest ice sheet, on the world's most mysterious continent, is already incredibly fascinating.

For starters, we already know that Antarctica isn't really a unified landmass beneath the ice, like it appears to us above the ice.

Were all of the continent's ice sheet to melt or be removed, the Antarctic continent's true shape would be revealed to us.

What we currently know as the Antarctic Peninsula in reality would emerge as a completely separate archipelago of mountainous islands that has sometimes been referred to as Lesser Antarctica.

While most of the rest of the continent, known as Greater Antarctica, would remain above the ocean surface and be roughly the same size as Australia.

Each of these two different halves of Antarctica, one archipelagic and one continental, would become this way because of their radically different geologies and histories.

The area of Greater Antarctica, or the eastern side of the continent, is known to consist of more ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks, while the more archipelagic Lesser Antarctica is much younger and made up of sedimentary and volcanic rocks instead.

Fascinatingly, Lesser Antarctica belongs to the Great Pacific Ring of Fire, a continuous belt of tectonic fault lines and active volcanoes that spans nearly the entire perimeter of the Pacific Ocean, and

which has existed for about the past 35 million years.

As a result, most of the archipelagos and islands that exist in Lesser Antarctica are volcanic in nature, despite their appearances of frozen ice and glaciers atop of them.

Mount Erebus, far to the east in Antarctica, is the highest active volcano on the continent and the southernmost active volcano on the planet, complete with a lake of molten lava within its inner summit crater that has been observable since the 1970s and the last erupted only a few years ago in 2020.

The average year round temperature around where Mount Erebus is located remains around minus 17 degrees Celsius.

And during the Antarctic winter months between April and September, the temperature will Never climb above -20 Celsius, and

it'll sink to as low as -62 degrees Celsius in August, cold enough to cause frostbite, to expose skin within minutes, or to instantly freeze water.

If you were to pour out a bowl of hot water in the air at these temperatures, it would turn to snow before it even hit the ground.

This is an environment that is incredibly hostile to life, where you wouldn't expect to find very much of it.

And yet, just beneath the surface of Mount Erebus is an entire new world that we've only just started to come to understand.

Decades and centuries worth of hot steam produced by the Mount Erebus volcano have carved out a network of tunnels through the ice beneath the mountain.

Within these sub volcanic ice caves, the temperatures are known to reach as high as 25 degrees Celsius, or about 77 Fahrenheit.

Warm enough for you or me to hang out down there in a T shirt and shorts and be comfortable doing it, despite being in the middle of Antarctica.

And that means that the Antarctic's subvolcanic cave systems could be warm enough to host all kinds of life that we may not even be aware of yet.

Back in 2017, a team led by the Australian National University acquired a sample of the soil within one of these cave systems beneath Mount Erebus.

And after analyzing its composition, they discovered that the soil contained DNA traces of things like algae and mosses.

But most tanalyzing of all, DNA traces of small animals that might be living down there as well, in a sub Antarctic oasis of life.

Most of these animal related DNA traces they found were similar to species that we already know of living up on the surface, but

Some of the traces couldn't be linked to species we already know about, but

were most closely related to anthropods, species like shrimp, centipedes or spiders.

Meaning that there could be arthropod like species down in these warm caves beneath Mount Erebus that remain unknown to mankind.

And Indeed there are 15 other active or semi active volcanoes located across Antarctica that could contain similar warm steam carved tunnels and caves beneath them all as well.

Meaning that there could be more than a dozen of these oasis like ecosystems beneath the ice of Antarctica that we presently know virtually nothing about.

Planes flying over Antarctica with radioecho sounding data have revealed a vast landscape beneath the ice of rolling valleys, riverbeds and hills, similar to the landscape seen elsewhere on Earth, only frozen in time and locked beneath kilometers of ice.

One of the most interesting geographic features on the continent that was only recently discovered in 2019, however, is what we now know as the deepest canyon anywhere on the Earth's land surface.

A canyon that if it wasn't hidden by the ice above, it would put the Grand Canyon in America to shame.

Within Greater Antarctica, beneath the Denman Glacier, exists the canyon that we now understand plummets to three and a half kilometers deep beneath the sea level, which is just insanely deep.

For reference, this canyon in Antarctica sinks to a depth that is roughly the same as the average depth of the Atlantic ocean.

And it's roughly half as deep as Mount Everest is tall.

The deepest point below sea level on exposed land on the planet is the shoreline around the Dead Sea between Jordan, Israel and the West Bank.

And it only sinks to as low as 413 meters beneath sea level.

This canyon in Antarctica sinks nearly 8.5 times deeper than that.

Only in the oceans do canyons dip deeper below the surface.

And we didn't even know about this super deep canyon on Antarctica until 2019 because it's been covered up by kilometers worth of ice for millions of years.

Now imagine what looking out at this canyon would be like without all of the ice obscuring it.

But the deepest canyon on the Earth is far from the only interesting geographic feature that the ice of the frozen continent has been hiding from us.

In 1958, a team of Soviet researchers in Antarctica discovered a massive mountain range beneath the ice sheet that nobody knew about beforehand.

That became known as the Gambartsev Mountain Range, Named after the Soviet geophysicist Grigori Gamburtsev.

These mountains are roughly the same length and height as the Alps in Southern Europe are running for about 1,200 kilometers long, with peaks soaring up to as much as 2,700 meters high.

They're also completely obscured from the surface because they are buried beneath more than 600 meters of ice and snowpack.

And they're still far from the only interesting thing hidden beneath the ice of the continent.

In the late 1950s and early 60s, researchers began detecting a large gravity anomaly in East Antarctica, where the gravity present was weaker than what would be naturally expected.

The anomaly spanned across a huge area beneath the Antarctic ice sheet that was about 243 kilometers wide and sunk down to a depth of about 848 meters.

For decades, there were several hypotheses about what exactly could be causing this weaker gravity in the area of East Antarctica.

Until in 2006, a team of researchers from Ohio State University, using data from satellites owned by NASA and the German Aerospace center, managed to identify what they believed to be an ancient 480 kilometer wide meteorite impact crater that was buried beneath the ice sheet.

But because of the area's extremely remote location and distance beneath several kilometers worth of solid ice, there still to date, have never been any direct samples taken from the area to actually test for this impact event hypothesis.

And so the idea that an asteroid could have impacted this area and caused a massive crater in Antarctica is still only a theory for now, but

If the gravity anomaly here Turns out to indeed be a meteorite impact crater.

It would be by far the largest one Ever discovered in the world.

With a width that's nearly three times as large as the Chisculub impact crater in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico that is believed to have been formed by a 10 kilometer wide asteroid that struck the area roughly 66 million years ago and likely contributed to the annihilation of the dinosaurs.

In order to create an impact crater Nearly three times larger Than that one in Antarctica, the asteroid that might have hit the area Would have had to have been four to five times larger Than the dinosaur killer asteroid was.

An asteroid that would have been big enough to stretch from Central park in New York City all the way into Connecticut.

Now, because of effects like erosion, Impact craters on the Earth's surface Gradually disappear over time.

Because of this phenomenon, the Ohio State University researchers who concluded that the structure hidden beneath the Antarctic ice sheet Was an impact crater Believe that it happened no more than 500 million years ago and no less than 100 million years ago.

Because the structure seems to also have been geographically disturbed by the rift valley in the area.

Area that only formed around 100 million years ago during the separation of Antarctica and Australia from the ancient Gondwana supercontinent.