An Ex-Navy Officer Exposes The Truth About Antarctica

Everyone is aware that Antarctica is the world’s most mysterious continent. And the continent’s mystery deepens when we find that the FAA has established a No-Fly Zone in its centre. However, before we continue down the rabbit hole any further, we need to take a close look at the Piri Reis Map.

The Piri Reis map portrays today’s ice-free Antarctic continent as a verdant continent.

Around 500 years ago, a Russian expedition commanded by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev unearthed this one-of-a-kind chart.

While escorting a party of explorers and scientists on the cold continent, a navy officer recalls his escapades. He also witnessed a medical emergency in Antarctica.

When the naval officer was forced to travel the Antarctic ice due to a medical emergency, he noticed a massive ice crack.

He said that the whole team of researchers he accompanied to Antarctica vanished abruptly for two weeks, during which no one could locate them.

When they returned from wherever they had gone, they were outraged by what had occurred and were instructed not to speak about it by high officials.

This weird structure is on the ice, and early examination has revealed that it is either a natural phenomenon or a man-made construction.

However, this is not a one-off occurrence. Numerous fascinating constructions, unusual artefacts, and even huge pyramids have been discovered in Antarctica over time.

The image below depicts an unidentified object that collided with a hill in Antarctica.

One thing is certain: Antarctica has always been and will continue to be a mystery area not accessible to the general public.

There are ideas that an old subterranean society exists, and that certain gateways in Antarctica offer access to this realm.

Ernest Shackleton’s Lost Shipwreck Found After 100 Years

A team of researchers from the Falkland Islands Maritime Heritage Foundation announced the discovery of the Endurance, the search for which resumed in early 2022. This ship, which sank off the coast of Antarctica in 1915, was found in the Weddell Sea at a depth of more than three kilometres. 

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition

Speaking of Antarctic explorers, not everyone now remembers Sir Ernest Shackleton. Most likely, this is due to the fact that even his contemporaries did not fully appreciate what the Endurance team faced and overcame (Endurance). And this is understandable – there was the First World War.

In 1914, the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, began the purpose of which was to cross overland throughout Antarctica.

A team of 56 people went to the South Pole on two ships – the Endurance and the Aurora. The crew of the Endurance planned to approach the coast of the Weddell Sea, spend the winter in Fasel Bay, and then move to the South Pole.

However, the ship encountered dense ice already in December 1914 and began to drift. In the autumn of the following year, the expedition members finally left the ship, squeezed by ice, which soon sank. Despite the most difficult conditions, the crew of the Endurance managed to escape.

Researchers finally found and photographed the wreckage of the sunken ship Endurance

Modern explorers have repeatedly attempted to find the sunken ship. It was assumed that the wreckage of the ice-crushed Endurance was well preserved, as it was all these years in conditions of extreme cold, lack of light, and low oxygen levels.

The next major search expedition, Endurance22, launched in early 2022 from Cape Town.

The Endurance22 team, led by John Shears, reported that they were able to locate the wreckage of the Endurance. This was done during the survey of the search area in the Weddell Sea. According to scientists, Ernest Shackleton’s ship was at a depth of 3008 meters.

Polar explorers conducted their work from the South African ship “Agulhas II”, which had been preparing for the expedition for two years.

The Saab Sabertooth underwater search vehicles, equipped with the necessary sensors, lights, and cameras, made it possible to find the Endurance.

British maritime archaeologist who participated in the expedition, Mensun Bound (Mensun Bound) reported that the discovered ship was in excellent condition.

“It stands upright, holds well on the seabed, is intact, and is in excellent condition. You can even see the Endurance sign on the stern.”

The wreck is protected as a historic site and monument under the Antarctic Treaty, which ensures that the wreck cannot be touched or disturbed in any way during surveys.

Ernest Shackleton’s Lost Ship Endurance, Found Off Antarctica Coast After 107 Years

An expedition that set out in search of the lost ship of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton has found it — 106 years after the vessel sank off Antarctica. The wooden ship Endurance has been located remarkably intact about 10,000 feet underwater in the Weddell Sea.

The find is “a milestone in polar history,” said Mensun Bound, a maritime archaeologist and the director of the exploration on the expedition, called Endurance22.

“This is by far the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen. It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact and in a brilliant state of preservation. You can even see ‘Endurance’ arced across the stern,” Bound said.

Shackleton’s trans-Antarctic expedition went dangerously awry

As World War I was beginning in 1914, the British explorer Shackleton set out to traverse Antarctica. The plan was for Shackleton to take 27 men on two ships, the Endurance and the Aurora, that would arrive at different locations on the continent to explore two routes by which to sledge across the ice. But in January 1915, the Endurance became trapped in ice off the coast of Antarctica.

The men lived on the ship for months, but pressure from the ice began to slowly crush it. On Oct. 27, 1915, Shackleton gave the order to abandon the Endurance. The men were told to gather no more than 2 pounds each of personal gear from the ship; much of the ship’s supplies had already become inaccessible because of broken timbers in the hull. The Endurance finally broke up and sank into the Weddell Sea on Nov. 21, 1915.

The crew made a new camp on an ice floe, and any ambition to cross Antarctica dissipated. The mission was now one of survival, a saga that would stretch into August 1916 before all the men were rescued.

The Aurora also became trapped in ice. Three men from that voyage died before the final members of the crew were rescued in early 1917.

An expedition to find the long-missing ship is successful

This year’s expedition to find the Endurance set sail from Cape Town, South Africa, on Feb. 5.

John Shears, the expedition leader, said the hunt for the Endurance was “probably the most challenging shipwreck search ever undertaken.”

The expedition used sonar to find the sunken ship. It was located about 4 miles south of where Capt. Frank Worsley had noted the ship’s location back in 1915.

Then the team used an autonomous underwater vehicle with a camera on it to swim over the hull and the deck and confirm what the team had found.

“It can only be one ship,” Shears said. “In this area, few ships have ever even been here. We’re only, I think, the fourth ship to ever get into this place in the Wendell Sea. It’s Endurance. It can be nothing else.”

Shears says he was stunned by the good condition of the vessel: There’s hardly anything living on it, and even some of the original paint is intact.

“You can see inside the hatchways, the stairs. You can see the ropes and the rigging. It’s as if it sank only yesterday,” he said.

The wreck will stay where it was found, protected as a historical site and monument under the Antarctic Treaty. That means that though the Endurance is being filmed and surveyed, it won’t be disturbed.

The expedition crew now returns to Cape Town.

Bound, the expedition’s exploration director, said the discovery is not only about the past but also about bringing the story of Shackleton and the Endurance to the next generation.

“We hope our discovery will engage young people and inspire them with the pioneering spirit, courage and fortitude of those who sailed Endurance to Antarctica,” Bound said. “We pay tribute to the navigational skills of Capt. Frank Worsley, the captain of the Endurance, whose detailed records were invaluable in our quest to locate the wreck.”

Researchers Find a Lost Subterranean World in a Cave Beneath Antarctica

The 24th Ukrainian expedition members to Antarctica have managed to trace down a cave that had long been lost. The subterranean formation is three times larger than previously thought and features several lakes and a river, as reported on September 10 by the press service of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.

The subterranean world is found inside the Cave of a remote place, the Island of Galindez.

The Cave was actually found long ago when the first Antarctic expeditions took place. Through time, experts lost track of the Cave, and it was forgotten. The Ukrainian expedition has revealed that the Antarctic cave was actually three times larger than previously thought.

A Lost Subterranean World

The entrance at the time was on the opposite side of the island and under the top of a glacier near the Vernadsky Research Base. However, the glacier collapsed, and the entrance was sealed.

The chief of the 24th Antarctic expedition, Igor Diki, explained that it took quite some time to find the Cave entrance again.

“There were several failed attempts to find it from the side of the Penola Strait. But we were lucky to find the entrance from the side of the Wordie House, the former British base,” he revealed in a statement.

This fascinating subterranean world has three levels with a total width of around 200 meters. Inside the Cave, there is an ice river and two lakes; the explorers have revealed that the Cave is at least three times bigger than initially thought.

In addition to that, the researchers claim to have discovered the plume of a bird that they say is definitely not that of a penguin.

This unexpected find was recovered and set to Ukraine for further testing. Researchers also took water samples from the frozen river and lake for hydrochemical analysis and further studies on the presence of viruses and bacteria and their environmental DNA.

The statement revealed that the ice samples would be stored for further research in Ukrainian laboratories.

The Vernadsky Research Base has been operating since 1996 and was founded in 1953 on Galindez’s island by British researchers, who initially named the station Faraday.

Galindez Island owes its name to the ARA Uruguay corvette commander of the Argentine Navy, Captain Ismael Galíndez.

The ship rescued the explorers from the third French Antarctic expedition that discovered the islet in the early twentieth century.

The Vernadsky Research base was named after Russian and Ukrainian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945), the first president of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Drilling under Antarctic ice shelf, scientists find treasure trove of life with 77 species

Far beneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there is more marine life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Current Biology, published this week.

Despite occupying nearly 1.6 million km2, ice shelves are amongst the least known environments on Earth. Life has been seen in these perpetual dark, cold and still habitats on camera but has rarely been collected.

Using hot water, a team of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, Germany, drilled two holes, through nearly 200 meters of the Ekström Ice Shelf near Neumayer Station III in the South Eastern Weddell Sea in 2018. The environment is harsh and extremely cold (minus 2.2 degrees centigrade).

The fragments of a life on the seabed collected were extraordinary and completely unexpected.

Despite being several kilometres from the open sea, the biodiversity of the specimens they collected was extremely rich. In fact, richer than many open water samples found on the continental shelf where there are light and food sources.

The team discovered an incredible 77 species—including saber shaped bryozoans (moss animals) such as Melicerita obliqua and serpulid worms such as Paralaeospira sicula, more than previously known about from this entire environment.

Lead author Dr. David Barnes, a marine biologist at British Antarctic Survey, says:

“This discovery of so much life living in these extreme conditions is a complete surprise and reminds us how Antarctic marine life is so unique and special.

It’s amazing that we found evidence of so many animal types, most feed on micro-algae (phytoplankton) yet no plants or algae can live in this environment. So the big question is how do these animals survive and flourish here?”

The team concludes there must be enough algae carried under the ice shelf from open water to fuel a strong food web. Microscopy of samples showed that, surprisingly, the annual growth of four of the species was comparable with similar animals in open marine Antarctic shelf habitats.

Co-author Dr. Gerhard Kuhn (AWI), who coordinated the drilling project, says:

“Another surprise was to find out how long life has existed here. Carbon dating of dead fragments of these seafloor animals varied from current to 5800 years. So, despite living 3-9 km from the nearest open water, an oasis of life may have existed continuously for nearly 6000 years under the ice shelf. Only samples from the seafloor beneath the floating ice shelf will tell us stories from its past history.”

Current theories on what life could survive under ice shelves suggest that all life becomes less abundant as you move further away from open water and sunlight. Past studies have found some small mobile scavengers and predators, such as fish, worms, jellyfish or krill, in these habitats. But filter-feeding organisms—which depend on a supply of food from above—were expected to be amongst the first to disappear further under the ice.

The team also notes that with climate change and the collapse of these ice shelves, time is running out to study and protect these ecosystems.

“Richness, growth, and persistence of life under an Antarctic ice shelf” by David K.A. Barnes, Gerhard Kuhn, Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand, Raphael Gromig, Nikola Koglin, Boris K. Biskaborn, Bettina A.V. Frinault, Johann P. Klages, and Julian Gutt is published in the journal Current Biology.

Interesting Claim: “Antarctica Is The Place Where Fallen Angels Are Still Alive But Locked In”

A recent movie was made and published by an Israeli news reporting channel.

The movie is titled “Fallen Angels are locked in Antarctica and Are Still Alive” and according to them, it is an unbiased view of the conspiracy theory.

Most theorists around the globe were pretty sceptical about it, as most news reporting channels don’t wish to delve too deep into these theories, but luckily, the movie was actually quite well made, to say the least.

You can tell that the creators put a lot of time and thought into it, especially the commentator Steven Ben-Nun who speaks of his own experience studying the apocryphal script The Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch showcases the story of how Enoch became the intermediary between the Fallen Angels and the Angels of Justice.

The two races were fighting one another because the Fallen Angels wished to procreate with human females and after doing so they created the Nephilim, also known as the Giants.

The Giants dethroned the Fallen Angels and, in this movie, they claim that the Fallen Angels’ base Mount Hermon was then taken over by the Giants.

According to the film, the Fallen Angels are now locked somewhere in Antarctica and we need to find out where they are so we can release them or at the very least study them.

Remains of 90 million-year-old rainforest discovered under Antarctic ice

When dinosaurs roamed the Earth 90 million years ago, the planet was much warmer, including Antarctica at the South Pole. But in a surprising twist, researchers have discovered evidence that Antarctica also supported a swampy rainforest at the time, according to a new study.

Researchers captured a slice of the seafloor using a drill rig aboard a polar research vessel on West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea between February and March in 2017. The sediment core sample was taken near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.

CT scans of the sediment core revealed pristine samples of forest soil, pollen, spores and even root systems so well preserved that they could identify cell structures. The soil included examples of pollen from the first flowering plants found this close to the South Pole.

They dated the soil, its fine-grained clay and silt to 90 million years ago. Their study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“During the initial shipboard assessments, the unusual colouration of the sediment layer quickly caught our attention; it clearly differed from the layers above it,” said Johann Klages, study author and geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute. “We had found a layer originally formed on land, not in the ocean.”

Scientists know that during the age of the dinosaurs, conditions were warmer. The mid-Cretaceous era, from 80 million to 115 million years ago, was the warmest period for Earth in the past 140 million years, the researchers said. The surface of the sea likely reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in tropical areas. And the sea level was 558 feet higher than it is now.

But there has been no evidence about what conditions were like at the South Pole. This is the southernmost sample of the Cretaceous period collected so far, revealing what Antarctica was like between 83 and 93 million years ago.

“The preservation of this 90-million-year-old forest is exceptional, but even more surprising is the world it reveals,” said Tina van de Flierdt, study co-author and professor in the Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering. “Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected.”

Sediment cores can record a lot of information about climate, acting as a time capsule for average temperature, rainfall and vegetation.

“To get a better idea of what the climate was like in this warmest phase of the Cretaceous, we first assessed the climatic conditions under which the plants’ modern descendants live,” Klages said.

The findings paint an unusual portrait of the South Pole, where West Antarctica’s coast was free of the ice caps that cover it now and swampy rainforests covered the area instead.

The average daytime temperature was 53 degrees Fahrenheit. While that sounds mild to us, this is incredibly warm for a location near the South Pole, where current daytime temperatures hover between negative 76 degrees to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. And, as the researchers point out, it’s only two degrees warmer than Germany at the moment in March.

The Antarctic ice sheet didn’t exist at the time. River and swamp temperatures were likely around 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And the Antarctic summer temperature was likely around 66 degrees Fahrenheit. They estimate rainfall reached about 97 inches per year — about the same as Wales today.

The forests were similar to those now found on New Zealand’s South Island, the researchers said.

But how did Antarctica sustain temperate rainforests without year-round sunlight? Even millions of years ago, the South Pole endured what’s known as a four-month polar night when no sunlight can be seen.
The researchers investigated the levels of carbon dioxide that would have been in the atmosphere at the time.

They found atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher than expected based on existing climate models. Carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the atmosphere and the planet, creating a greenhouse effect by trapping heat from the sun.

The high amount of carbon dioxide, combined with an ice sheet-less Antarctica covered in vegetation created the right conditions for a rainforest environment.

“We now know that there could easily be four straight months without sunlight in the Cretaceous. But because the carbon dioxide concentration was so high, the climate around the South Pole was nevertheless temperate, without ice masses,” said Torsten Bickert, study co-author and geoscientist at the University of Bremen’s MARUM research centre.

But the scientists still don’t know what caused Antarctica to cool off enough to form ice sheets, which leads them to their next challenge.

Traces of ancient rainforest in Antarctica point to a warmer prehistoric world

According to fossil roots, pollen, and spores recently found in West Antarctica, a thriving temperate rainforest existed around 90 million years ago.

The world was a different place back then. During the middle of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 65 million years ago), dinosaurs roamed Earth and sea levels were 558 feet (170 meters) higher than they are today. Sea-surface temperatures in the tropics were as hot as 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius).

This scorching climate allowed a rainforest — similar to those seen in New Zealand today — to take root in Antarctica, the researchers said. 

The rainforest’s remains were discovered under the ice in a sediment core that a team of international researchers collected from a seabed near Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica in 2017. 

As soon as the team saw the core, they knew they had something unusual. The layer that had formed about 90 million years ago was a different colour. “It clearly differed from the layers above it,” study lead researcher Johann Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, said in a statement.

Back at the lab, the team put the core into a CT (computed tomography) scanner. The resulting digital image showed a dense network of roots throughout the entire soil layer. The dirt also revealed ancient pollen, spores and the remnants of flowering plants from the Cretaceous period.

By analyzing the pollen and spores, study co-researcher Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University in England, was able to reconstruct West Antarctica’s 90 million-year-old vegetation and climate.

“The numerous plant remains indicate that the coast of West Antarctica was, back then, a dense temperate, swampy forest, similar to the forests found in New Zealand today,” Salzmann said in the statement.

The sediment core revealed that during the mid-Cretaceous, West Antarctica had a mild climate, with an annual mean air temperature of about 54 F (12 C), similar to that of Seattle. Summer temperatures were warmer, with an average of 66 F (19 C). In rivers and swamps, the water would have reached up to 68 F (20 C).

In addition, the rainfall back then was comparable to the rainfall of Wales, England, today, the researchers found.

These temperatures are impressively warm, given that Antarctica had a four-month polar night, meaning that a third of every year had no life-giving sunlight.

However, the world was warmer back then, in part, because the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was high — even higher than previously thought, according to the analysis of the sediment core, the researchers said.

“Before our study, the general assumption was that the global carbon dioxide concentration in the Cretaceous was roughly 1,000 ppm [parts per million],” study co-researcher Gerrit Lohmann, a climate modeler at Alfred Wegener Institute, said in the statement. “But in our model-based experiments, it took concentration levels of 1,120 to 1,680 ppm to reach the average temperatures back then in the Antarctic.”

These findings show how potent greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide can cause temperatures to skyrocket, so much so that today’s freezing West Antarctica once hosted a rainforest. Moreover, it shows how important the cooling effects of today’s ice sheets are, the researchers said.