The Face of Antarctica: Claims of Massive Face Buried Beneath the Ice

The conspiracy nuts reckon they’ve found a grimacing face carved into the ice at a remote region in the southeast of the island. Notorious Instagram account ufo_scandinavia uploaded strange footage last week showing the bizarre anomaly.

It shows a man zooming in and out of a satellite snap on Google Earth. The snow in view appears to have the shape of eyes, a nose and a mouth. The mouth appears to be contorted in a terrifying grimace. The strange image sparked a frenzy online, with some claiming it’s evidence of a hidden civilisation.

Conspiracy theorists Blake and Brett Cousins – of YouTube channel thirdphaseofmoon – shared their thoughts on the Google Earth image.

“It appears to be a massive, ancient structure of some kind of face that is being revealed for the first time on Google Earth,” Blake said in his video.

“I would have to concur that whatever we’re looking at resembles some sort of megastructure.”

Brett added: “Could this be something that was left behind by the ancient civilisations of Antarctica?

“Ice melting could be revealing structures that would baffle the world.”

Around 90,000 people have watched the original Instagram footage of the Antarctic face.

One user quipped: “That is not a natural thing that mother nature made by wind and cold. Looks like a Viking. Metal helmet with the nose piece running down the upper part.”

Another said: “No mind trick, that’s definitely a face.”

Others were more sensible in their approach. One explained: “This is purely natural and random. Looks like ice with cracks.”

The find is most likely the result of pareidolia, a bizarre effect that causes the brain to see shapes, structures and patterns where they do not exist.

According to Nasa: “Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognisable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data.

“There are many examples of this phenomenon on Earth and in space.”

This is not the first time conspiracy nutters have made outrageous claims about satellite snaps.

Back in April, one prominent UFO-hunter claimed to have found an alien sculpture of a nude woman on a distant asteroid. In March, he said he’d found a carving of the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates on a mound on Mars. In other space news, Nasa’s manned mission to Mars could be delayed by 25 years as experts warn of radiation, health scares and food shortages.

Japan is ready to mine Mars’s largest moon after successfully completing all of the compulsory space contamination paperwork. Nasa managed to record the incredible sound of a ‘Marsquake’.

This Alien-Looking Creature Has Survived in Antarctica for at Least 30 Ice Ages

In Antarctica, a team of scientists who have been looking for it for decades have recently rediscovered a small insect-like organism that has survived 30 ice ages.

“This is what we affectionately refer to as the phantom springtail,” says BYU (Brigham Young University) biology professor Byron Adams., who conducts regular research in Antarctica.

“And we call it the phantom springtail because it’s white, like a ghost, but since we hadn’t found it after looking for it for years and years and years, we started to wonder if it was real if it really existed.”

In an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers used the history of small microscopic Antarctic animals to understand exactly how the dynamics of the ice sheet developed over time and how they affected historic ecosystems.

“The evolutionary history of biological organisms can corroborate what we inferred from glaciology and geology about climate change in the past,” Adams said in a statement. “By doing so, we can better predict how life on Earth might respond to these kinds of changes now.”

Researchers have spent the past 20 years collecting samples from six different species of microarthropods at 91 sites in Antarctica. These tiny animals, known as springtails, live on the ground. They have very limited mobility and can only colonize ice-free areas.

During ice ages, ice sheets advance, expanding their coverage of living space, while during warming periods, ice sheets contract and become smaller, leaving more open spaces where ground animals can disperse.

By studying their current locations and patterns of genealogical and evolutionary divergence, Adams and his team can better understand how the West Antarctic ice sheet has changed over time.

The researchers found four species of the creatures, each showing genetically distinct populations in locations likely isolated for millions of years. The other two species were less genetically diverse, although their distribution was restricted.

Together, these patterns give an independent estimate of the timing and magnitude of the ice sheet advance and retreat. Antarctica.

Scientists accidentally discover species living in -2°C temperatures under the ice shelf in Antarctica

Beneath the Antarctic ice sheets, there is still a lot of living organisms surviving in a very harsh climate, as found in a recent Frontiers in Marine Science report. During an exploratory survey, researchers drilled through 900 meters of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, situated on the southeastern Weddell Sea.

Very few species have ever been observed under these environments at a distance of 260 km from the open ocean, in total darkness and with temperatures of -2.2 ° C.

This research, however, is the first to discover the presence of stationary animals – similar to sponges and potentially several previously unknown species – attached to a boulder on the seafloor.

“This discovery is one of those fortunate accidents that pushes ideas in a different direction and shows us that Antarctic marine life is incredibly special and amazingly adapted to a frozen world,” says biogeographer and lead author, Dr Huw Griffiths of British Antarctic Survey.

“Our discovery raises so many more questions than it answers, such as how did they get there? What are they eating? How long have they been there? How common are these boulders covered in life? Are these the same species as we see outside the ice shelf or are they new species? And what would happen to these communities if the ice shelf collapsed?”

Floating ice shelves represent the greatest unexplored habitat in the Southern Ocean. They cover more than 1.5m sq km of the Antarctic continental shelf, but only a total area similar in size to a tennis court has been studied through eight prior boreholes.

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.

So, it came as a surprise when the team of geologists, drilling through the ice to collect sediment samples, hit a rock instead of mud at the bottom of the ocean below. They were even more surprised by the video footage, which showed a large boulder covered in strange creatures.

New Antarctic expedition needed

This is the first-ever record of a hard substrate (ie a boulder) community deep beneath an ice shelf and it appears to go against all previous theories of what types of life could survive there.

Given the water currents in the region, the researchers calculate that this community may be as much as 1,500km upstream from the closest source of photosynthesis.

Other organisms are also known to collect nutrients from glacial melts or chemicals from methane seeps, but the researchers won’t know more about these organisms until they have the tools to collect samples of these organisms–a significant challenge in itself.

“To answer our questions we will have to find a way of getting up close with these animals and their environment – and that’s under 900 meters of ice, 260km away from the ships where our labs are,” continues Griffiths.

“This means that as polar scientists, we are going to have to find new and innovative ways to study them and answer all the new questions we have.”

Griffiths and the team also note that with the climate crisis and the collapse of these ice shelves, time is running out to study and protect these ecosystems.

New satellite images reveal mysterious dome structure hidden in Antarctica fuelling shock claims an ancient civilization once lived there

We’ve got a digital picture of a ‘dome’ in Antarctica that shortly after, has sparked wild rumors of a civilization living in the frozen continent. The picture, which is said to be from Google Earth, shows an oval-shaped structure that is believed to be 400 feet (121 meters) across.

The so-called formation has been said to be evidence of a human culture that once occupied the South Pole. It can even be considered a natural phenomenon, as some people believe that.

‘What if, in the distant past, when Earth –and Antarctica— was much different than today, an ancient civilization developed there, creating fascinating structures, monuments and temples there?’ a post on Ancient Code says.

The post says scientists initially thought the discovery could be a sastrugi – a natural phenomenon formed by years of battering by strong, freezing winds and heavy snowfall.

But sastrugi are not known to form in oval shapes, as shown in the picture.  This is not the first time people have suggested there was a lost civilisation in Antarctica. Pictures released by Nasa from its IceBridge ice-mapping mission triggered a few people to claim evidence for this lost civilization had been found.

Ashoka Tripathi, of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Calcutta, said the images showed clear evidence of an ancient human settlement beneath the ice sheet, according to World News Daily.

‘These are clearly features of some sort of human-made structure, resembling some sort of pyramidal structure,’ he said.

‘The patterns clearly show nothing we should expect from natural geomorphological formations found in nature. 

‘We clearly have here evidence of human engineering. The only problem is that these photographs were taken in Antarctica under 2 kilometers of ice. That is clearly the puzzling part, we do not have any explanation for this at the moment.’

Another strange theory surfaced last year, claiming that there is a mysterious pyramid in the Antarctic had emerged. Conspiracy theorists have posted a video on YouTube, in which they claim that US Secretary of State, John Kerry, visited Antarctica last week to visit an ‘alien base’ within the pyramid.

The video suggests that the images have been taken from Google Earth, but it is unclear whether they have been edited. The video was posted by the Third Phase of the Moon, a YouTube channel that regularly posts conspiracy theories on aliens.

It showed a pyramid-like structure in the snow, with a Google Earth-type label and pin. The label reads ‘Antarctica Pyramid’ – a misspelling of Antarctica, which suggests that the image might have been doctored.

Responses to the video were varied, with some users backing-up the claims, such as James Jason, who commented: ‘Excellent report Third Phase, I also believe things are about to get very dramatic, and that is for everyone on our planet.’

But others dismissed it, such as Gordon Anderson, who said: ‘I have spent a LOT of time on snow-covered mountains- skiing down, and this looks natural to me – not man-made anyway!’

Others joked John Kerry was there for other reasons, such as Daniel Schultz, who commented: ‘on his bucket list, fly to Antarctica and make ‘snow angels’ where no man has gone before.’

It is unclear what the structure could be, but it looks similar to a nunatak – a natural mountain peak that juts up above glaciers.

Nigel Watson, the author of the UFO Investigations Manual, told MailOnline: ‘Pictures of the pyramid structures are either photoshopped, cropped pictures to make the mountains look more like pyramids or simply pictures of natural formations called nunataks. 

‘They are mountainous formations created by shifting glaciers and erosion, not by laser zapping aliens.’ 

Pyramids are often an area of interest for conspiracy theorists. 

In October last year, a video posted on YouTube claimed there was a crystal pyramid beneath the Bermuda Triangle, which was to blame for the disappearance of several planes and ships in the area.

Mr. Watson added: There is always a mystique about pyramid structures. Back in the 1970s, there were many claims that such objects could preserve food, generate health benefits and even keep razors sharp.

500 Year Old Map Was Discovered That Shatters The “Official” History Of The Planet

How many times has the rise and fall of human civilization actually occurred on planet Earth? It has been said that the conventional wisdom that has been passed down for generations (at least that’s where we think the knowledge came from) is not old enough, or there was some disconnect somewhere.

There’s a lot of fake things out there on this topic, but the fact is if you really look close, we can’t account for the existence of many of the world’s mysterious monolithic or archaeological sites.

From the Bosnian Pyramids to the amazing site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, to the South African site of Adam’s Calendar, they all irrefutably bring up questions about the origin of humanity itself.

Some sites seem to pre-date human civilization. How can that be explained? Knowing so many other things in life generally are not how they seem, and around every corner in what we were told about the history there is a deception, why wouldn’t there be an official deception located in this field of thought? Who, or what kind of entity could have possibly constructed so many elaborate and practically difficult to understand structures around the planet, millennia ago?

Obviously, our amnesia about the origin of humanity and literally everything about our existence is just a feature of this life. However, it doesn’t have to be such a mystery when it comes to things more concrete than the past-life amnesia people believe we were born with: we can concretely understand the history of humanity a little more.

Many people believe that before about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the official narrative for how old civilization gets, there must have been other intelligent and/or advanced human civilizations before that time.

Mapmaking itself was once considered much more of a complex task, characteristic of what they call civilized society. Some Babylonian clay tablets that seem to find origin around 1000BC seem to be the first known evidence of map-making.

One piece of the puzzle is thought to be this: the Admiral Piri Reis world map of 1513.

The official first sight of Antarctica reportedly was accomplished by a Russian expedition in 1820. Today it is believed that the continent’s ice caps formed about 34-45 million years ago. With some basic logic that means prior to 1820 Antarctica should not be present on any map, and of course, the continent should contain polar ice caps.

However, Ottoman cartographer and military admiral Piri Reis made a map that seems to contain Antarctica about 500 years ago.

The Piri Reis map has a central focus on the East Coast of South America, Western Africa, and it includes the Northern Antarctic Coast. It seems to illustrate in a surprising amount of detail just what Queen Maud Land in Antarctica looks like. It’s accurate, and in the map, the ice-cold continent was not depicted as a barren wasteland, but rather as a continent full of dense vegetation.

A New Hampshire history professor named Charles Hapgood believed that a much different view of ancient history is depicted by this map, and the findings are unforgettable. Albert Einstein himself wrote a supportive forward to a book written by Charles Hapgood in 1953:

“His idea is original, of great simplicity, and – if it continues to prove itself – of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the Earth’s surface.”

The map is certifiably not a hoax, absolutely authentic by every measure. Here’s where it gets strange: Piri Reis did not say that he or his people specifically discovered Antarctica, but he noted that the information sourced for it was from other, much older maps, logs, and charts.

Hapgood suggests that perhaps the maps had been repeatedly copied and re-translated before the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria was the book burning of the new world, wiping out an incomprehensible treasure trove of info about the history of humanity, casting the historical knowledge of antiquity into the wind.

So Hapgood for some reason brought this info to the US Air Force of all people, and they performed testing of seismic data in Antarctica. Warning: these are not the people to trust. According to Fingerprints of the Gods:

“…the geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice-cap by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of 1949. This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap. The ice-cap in this region is now about a mile thick. Learn how to enter parallel worlds of consciousness We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographical knowledge in 1513. – Harold Z. Ohlmeyer Lt. Colonel, USAF Commander”

Was Antarctica a grassy, green land where life could thrive a mere 500 years ago, or perhaps several thousand years ago?

Scientists discover 280-million-year-old fossil forest in Antarctica

Antarctica wasn’t quite a region of ice for most of the year. It is widely believed that millions of years ago, when the planet earth was already a massive landmass called Gondwana, trees flourished near the South Pole.

Now, newfound, intricate fossils of some of these trees are revealing how the plants thrived — and what forests might look like as they march northward in today’s warming world.

“Antarctica preserves and ecologic history of polar biomes that ranges for about 400 million years, which is basically the entirety of plant evolution,” said Erik Gulbranson, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

TREES IN ANTARCTICA?

It’s hard to look at Antarctica’s frigid landscape today and imagine lush forests. To find their fossil specimens, Gulbranson and his colleagues have to disembark from planes landed on snowfields, then traverse glaciers and brave bone-chilling winds. But from about 400 million to 14 million years ago, the southern continent was a very different, and much greener place.

The climate was warmer, though the plants that survived at the low southern latitudes had to cope with winters of 24-hour-per-day darkness and summers during which the sun never set, just like today.

Gulbranson and his team are focused on an era centred around 252 million years ago, during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.

During this event, as many of 95 per cent of Earth’s species died out. The extinction was probably driven by massive greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes, which raised the planet’s temperatures to extreme levels and caused the oceans to acidify, scientists have found.

There are obvious parallels to contemporary climate change, Gulbranson said, which is less extreme but similarly driven by greenhouse gases.

Prior to the end-Permian mass extinction, the southern polar forests were dominated by one type of tree, those in the Glossopteris genus, Gulbranson told Live Science. These were behemoths that grew from 65 to 131 feet (20 to 40 meters) tall, with broad, flat leaves longer than a person’s forearm, Gulbranson said.

Before the Permian extinction, Glossopteris dominated the landscape below the 35th parallel south to the South Pole. (The 35th parallel south is a circle of latitude that crosses through two landmasses: the southern tip of South American and the southern tip of Australia.)

BEFORE AND AFTER

Last year, while fossil-hunting in Antarctica, Gulbranson and his team found the oldest polar forest on record from the southern polar region.

They haven’t dated that forest precisely yet, but it probably flourished about 280 million years ago before being rapidly buried in volcanic ash, which preserved it down to the cellular level, the researchers said.

On Thanksgiving Day, Gulbranson will return to Antarctica for more excavations at two sites. Those sites contain fossils from a period spanning from before to after the Permian extinction.

After the extinction, Gulbranson said, the forests didn’t disappear, but they changed. Glossopteris was out, but a new mix of evergreen and deciduous trees, including relatives of today’s gingkoes, moved in.

“What we’re trying to research is what exactly caused those transitions to occur, and that’s what we don’t know very well,” Gulbranson said.

The plants are so well-preserved in the rock that some of the amino acid building blocks that made up the trees’ proteins can still be extracted, said Gulbranson, who specializes in geochemistry techniques. Studying these chemical building blocks may help clarify how the trees handled the southern latitudes’ weird sunlight conditions, as well as the factors that allowed those plants to thrive but drove Glossopteris to its death, he said.

This season, the field team will have access to helicopters, which can land closer to the rugged outcrops in the Transantarctic Mountains where the fossil forests are found.

The team (members hail from the United States, Germany, Argentina, Italy and France) will camp out for months at a time, hitching helicopter rides to the outcrops as the fickle Antarctic weather allows. The 24-hour sun allows for long days, even middle-of-the-night expeditions that combine mountaineering with fieldwork, Gulbranson said.

Large Hidden Lakes Found Draining Below Antarctic Glacier

Thwaites Glacier on the edge of West Antarctica is one of the planet’s fastest-moving glaciers. Research shows that it is sliding unstoppably into the ocean, mainly due to warmer seawater lapping at its underside.

But the details of its collapse remain uncertain. The details are necessary to provide a timeline for when to expect 2 feet of global sea-level rise, and when this glacier’s loss will help destabilize the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Recent efforts have used satellites to map the underlying terrain, which affects how quickly the ice mass will move, and measure the glacier’s thickness and speed to understand the physics of its changes.

Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh used data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 to identify sudden drainage of large pools below Thwaites Glacier, one of two fast-moving glaciers at the edge of the ice sheet.

The study published Feb. 8 in The Cryosphere finds four interconnected lakes drained in the eight months from June 2013 and January 2014. The glacier sped up by about 10 percent during that time, showing that the glacier’s long-term movement is fairly oblivious to trickles at its underside.

“This was a big event, and it confirms that the long-term speed-up that we’re observing for this glacier is probably driven by other factors, most likely in the ocean,” said corresponding author Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “The water flow at the bed is probably not controlling the speed.”

Other glaciers, like some in Alaska and Greenland, can be very susceptible to changes in meltwater flow. The water there can pond beneath the glacier until it lifts off parts of its bed and suddenly surges forward. This can increase a glacier’s speed by several times and account for most of its motion.

Researchers were not certain whether such an effect might be at play with Thwaites Glacier.

“It’s been difficult to see details about water flow under the ice,” Smith said.

For the new study, the authors use a new technique to discover drops at the glacier’s surface of up to 70 feet (20 meters) over a 20 kilometer by 40-kilometer area. Calculations show it was likely due to the emptying of four interconnected lakes, the largest about the size of Lake Washington, far below.

The peak drainage rate was about 8,500 cubic feet (240 cubic meters) per second, about half the flow of the Hudson River — the largest meltwater outflow yet reported for subglacial lakes in this region.

“This lake drainage is the biggest water movement that you would expect to see in this area, and it didn’t change the glacier’s speed by that much,” Smith said. The reason is likely that Thwaites Glacier is moving quickly enough, he said, that friction is heating up its underside to ice’s melting point. The glacier’s base is already wet and adding more water doesn’t make it much more slippery.

The new study supports previous UW research from 2014 showing that Thwaites Glacier will likely collapse within 200 to 900 years to cause seas to rise by 2 feet. Those calculations were made without detailed maps of how water flows at the glacier’s underbelly. The new results suggest that doesn’t really matter.

“If Thwaites Glacier had really jumped in response to this lake drainage, then that would have suggested that we need a more detailed model of where water is flowing at the bed,” Smith said. “Radar data from NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge program has told us a lot about the shape of Thwaites Glacier, but it’s very difficult to see how water is moving. Based on this result, that may not be a big problem”

Melting at the ice sheet base would refill the lakes in 20 to 80 years, Smith said. Over time meltwater gradually collects in depressions in the bedrock. When the water reaches a certain level it breaches a weak point, then flows through channels in the ice. As Thwaites Glacier thins near the coast, its surface will become steeper, Smith said, and the difference in ice pressure between inland regions and the coast may push water coastward and cause more lakes to drain.

He hopes to apply the same techniques to study lake drainage below other glaciers, to understand how water flow at the base affects overall glacier movement. When NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite launches in 2018 the calculations will be easy to do with high precision.

“In 2018 this changes from a hard project to an easy project, and I’m excited about that,” Smith said.

Other co-authors are Alexander Huth and Ian Joughin at the UW and Noel Gourmelen at the University of Edinburgh. The research was funded by NASA and the European Space Agency.

The Mystery Behind the “Rare Emerald Icebergs” of Antarctica

For decades, the sight of bottle-green icebergs in the Antarctic has captivated polar travellers and scientists. The mysterious phenomena have intrigued many journals, but the “why for their presence has remained enigmatic. Today scientists have suggested a new theory of why these jade bergs are happening, and if verified, a decades-long enigma will be solved.

During an Australian expedition in 1988, the search to discover the secret of the green monoliths started when glaciologist Stephen Warren from the University of Washington climbed up on one to get a better look at it.

“What is most amazing is not their colour but rather their clarity, because they have no bubbles,” said Warren to IFLScience.

Ordinary icebergs, on the other hand, originate as snow and “as the snow is compressed under its own weight into ice, the air in the snow is closed off as bubbles. So glacier ice contains numerous bubbles, and icebergs are bright and cloudy.”

The emerald ice, however, has no bubbles, suggesting it is not ordinary glacier ice. Warren took a core sample from a glacier near East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf and compared it to other green ice samples from Australian expeditions in the 1980s. He found that the clear jade colouration was due to marine ice, not glacier ice.

Most icebergs seen by sailors in Antarctica are white or blue, some are even striped.

Green is a rarity. At first, Warren’s team suspected impurities in the ocean water beneath were transforming the ice green, perhaps from the trapped microscopic particles of dead marine plants and animals. But a sample of the ice proved their theory wrong: green and blue marine ice have similar amounts of organic material. 

It wasn’t until a few years ago that Warren was inspired to have another go at an idea. His inspiration was born from research by oceanographer Laura Herraiz-Borreguero at the University of Tasmania, who found that the Amery Ice Shelf core had nearly 500 times more iron than the glacial ice above.

He wondered if it was possible iron oxides are turning the common blue hue of ice a dark green. If so, where was the iron coming from? These compounds are scarce in many regions of the ocean.

Warren believes the answer may lie in “glacial flour” – the powder formed from glaciers grinding over bedrock, eroding particles from the surface. These iron-rich particles then flow into the ocean and become caught under an ice shelf, where they mingle with the marine ice as it forms.

The finding could play a role in sustaining life in the oceans. Iron is a key nutrient for the microscopic plants upon which many other organisms rely. If the green icebergs are shuttling iron from Antarctica’s mainland to the Southern Ocean, it could be a crucial process to marine life.

“Iron is the limiting nutrient for phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean, so the biological oceanographers are keen to quantify the various sources of iron,” said Warren, whose study is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. 

“Phytoplankton are the base of the food chain in the Southern Ocean. The photosynthesis by this phytoplankton also removes CO2 from the atmosphere, so they are important in the global carbon cycle.

With global warming, if the ocean water flowing in under the ice shelf becomes warmer, then probably less marine ice will form, and less iron will be delivered to the phytoplankton.”

To confirm their hypothesis, the team recommend further analysis of short cores from icebergs to measure dissolved organic carbon and particulate organic carbon versus depth, as well as the mineralogy of the iron. 

In the future, Warren, Herraiz-Borreguero, and her advisor Delphine Lannuzel hope to work together to sample icebergs for iron and measure their reflectance spectra.