Why We Can’t Truly Explore the Antarctic Ocean

Picture this. We’ve mapped the surface of Mars. We’ve sent humans to the moon. We’ve even explored the deepest trenches on Earth. But, there is an entire ocean on our own planet that is effectively locked. The Antarctic Ocean. In a normal ocean, the danger waits for you at the bottom.

 But, in the Antarctic, the danger starts before you even touch the water. Before you can even begin to ascend, you have to survive a barrier that crushes steel, that traps ships. You don’t get to just drop a submarine in and go down. So, why is this specific ocean so completely impenetrable? And if we can barely even get inside, what exactly is it hiding? Well, the most obvious answer that usually comes to mind is just the ice.

 Most people assume that the Antarctic Ocean is just like the Arctic Ocean up at the North Pole. In the north, the ocean freezes over in the winter, creating sea ice. And when we want to explore or move ships through it, we just use icebreakers. Icebreakers are these massive ships designed to literally ride up onto the frozen surface of the water, and then use their own sheer weight to crush the ice beneath them. It works perfectly.

 So, if we want to explore the Antarctic Ocean, we should probably [music] just send an icebreaker down there, punch a hole in the ice, and drop a submarine in. Problem solved. Except, that’s not how the ice in Antarctica works. The ice blocking the Antarctic Ocean is actually a massive ice shelf.

 And an ice shelf is actually a continental glacier, a massive sheet of ice that formed on land over millions of years that has slowly been pushed off the edge of the continent and is now floating on top of the ocean. These ice shelves can be thousands of feet thick. You’re basically looking at entire mountains sitting on top of the water.

 You can’t just break an ice shelf. Driving an icebreaker into the Ross Ice Shelf would be like driving a Honda Civic into a brick wall and expecting the wall to move. Spoiler alert, the Civic loses. It’s just an impenetrable mass. And because these shelves extend for hundreds of miles out from the actual rocky coastline of the continent, it means that massive portions of the Antarctic Ocean are permanently trapped underneath a ceiling of solid ice that’s half a mile thick.

 But let’s say you find a gap. Let’s say you find a spot at the very edge of the ice shelf where you can actually drop a remotely operated underwater vehicle, or an ROV, into the water to go look around. Great. You made it in. But realistically, getting into the water is where the actual problem start.

 The water underneath the Antarctic ice shelves is literally super cool. Normally, water freezes at 32° Fahrenheit, or 0° Celsius. But because the Antarctic Ocean is so salty, and under so much pressure, the freezing point of the water just drops. This means the water can drop below freezing temperatures while somehow still remaining a liquid.

 And this is terrible news for human technology. When you drop a state-of-the-art ROV into super cooled water, the extreme cold literally starts shutting it down at a chemical level. First, the battery life just vanishes. And not just, “Oh, my phone is at 10%, so I need a charger.” It’s just gone. Cold temperatures drastically slow down the chemical reactions inside batteries.

A power source that was supposed to last for 12 hours might completely die in 45 minutes. Then, the hydraulic fluids that control the robotic arms and the steering mechanism start to thicken. They turn from a smooth liquid into a useless sludge, meaning the robot literally cannot move its own parts. And worst of all, the metal itself changes.

In these sub-zero temperatures, the steel and titanium used to build these machines becomes incredibly brittle. A robotic arm that can normally withstand thousands of pounds of pressure might just snap clean off if it bumps into [music] a rock too hard. You bring a multi-million dollar robot down there and the ocean basically just turns it into a very expensive paperweight.

 But losing a robot is one thing. What happens if a human actually goes down there? So, I know the question all of us here at Beyond the Blue are thinking. What would actually happen if you were scuba diving near the edge of an ice shelf and you got lost underneath it? Even if you’re wearing the best drysuit on Earth, your body is instantly shutting down.

 The supercooled water drains heat from your body up to 25 times faster than the freezing air on the surface would. Your body basically panics, pulling all the blood away from your arms and legs to protect your vital organs. Within minutes, your hands become completely useless. You wouldn’t even have the motor function to operate your own dive gear and the physical cold is only half the problem.

 If you look down, you just see a bottomless void. But if you look up, you don’t see the surface. The underside of an ice shelf isn’t flat. It’s an upside-down landscape of jagged ice canyons, frozen spikes, and deep inverted crevices. Because it’s glacial ice, there’s absolutely zero air pockets. If you lose your guideline back to the entry hole, you’re just stuck.

 You can’t swim up because the ceiling is a thousand feet of solid ice. You can’t break through it. You can’t signal for help. You’re just stuck in the dark, slowly freezing to death with a literal mountain hanging upside down right above your head. So, yeah, maybe don’t go scuba diving there. Obviously, this is why individual human divers don’t go deep underneath the ice sheets.

But surely, the military could just send a massive nuclear submarine down there, right? If there’s one thing a nuclear attack submarine is good at, it’s going deep and staying hidden. So, you’d assume that the unexplored waters under the Antarctic ice would be the perfect playground for military subs.

 But, the military basically looks at this place and goes, >> “Yeah, absolutely not.” >> Submarines navigate almost entirely by using sonar. They send out a ping of sound, wait for it to bounce off an object, and then use the return time to map out their surroundings. In the open ocean, this works flawlessly.

 But, under the Antarctic ice shelf, sonar becomes your worst enemy. Because the underside of the ice is so jagged, the sound waves don’t bounce back cleanly. They scatter. They bounce off an ice spike, hit a frozen canyon wall, bounce back to the sub, and create what are known as acoustic illusions. The sub is completely blind.

 The computers will tell you that there’s walls everywhere, while completely missing the actual spikes of ice reaching hundreds of feet down into the water. And because the ice shelf is constantly shifting and groaning, massive chunks of ice the size of skyscrapers can suddenly snap off and sink underwater. A submarine could navigate into a clear channel, only for a massive block of ice to shift beneath them, completely blocking them in.

 If a submarine gets trapped under the ice shelf, there’s no rescue mission. They can’t radio for help through a mile of ice, and they can’t blast their way out with torpedoes. They just disappear. And the ice isn’t the only thing moving around down there. Even if you manage to build a submarine that could perfectly navigate the ice and perfectly withstand the cold, you’d still have to deal with the fact that the water itself is actively trying to freeze you.

 And this creates one of the weirdest things in the entire ocean, the brinicle. When the surface water around Antarctica does freeze into sea ice, the water molecules turn into solid ice, but the salt gets left behind. This creates pockets of super salty brine. Because this brine is so salty, it’s incredibly dense.

 And because it’s supercooled, it’s actually colder than the normal ocean water around it. So, this freezing toxic sludge starts to sink. As it sinks, it comes into contact with the slightly warmer ocean water below it. And because the brine is so cold, it instantly freezes the normal sea water it touches, creating a hollow tube of ice that grows downwards towards the seafloor.

 It looks like this, an underwater tornado made of ice, which sounds like a terrible Sci-Fi Channel movie, but it’s actually real. When the brinicle finally touches the ocean floor, it doesn’t stop. The super cooled brine spills out and just crawls along the bottom of the ocean. Anything in its path, starfish, sea urchins, slow-moving fish, is flash frozen.

 It’s essentially a frozen pipe of toxic sludge that reaches down from the ceiling and flash freezes everything it touches. And if an ROV or a small submersible submarine happens to get caught in the path of a rapidly forming brinicle, the super cooled brine will freeze the water inside the machine’s thrusters, completely locking it in place.

 But even if you avoid the brinicles, you’re still racing against a non-negotiable deadline. Exploring the Antarctic Ocean comes with a strict time limit. For a few months during the Antarctic summer, the sun stays up, the temperatures are somewhat manageable, and the sea ice around the edges of the continent melts just enough for research vessels to get close.

 But when winter hits, everything changes. The sun sets, and it doesn’t rise again for six entire months. The entire continent is plunged into pitch-black darkness. The temperatures drop to minus 100° Fahrenheit, and the ocean itself begins to freeze. The sea ice expands so fast that it literally doubles the physical size of the Antarctic continent.

Millions of square miles of open ocean turn into crushing ice. If a research ship miscalculates their departure time and stays a few weeks too long, they’ll be trapped. The ocean will freeze around the hull of the ship and the sheer pressure of the expanding ice will slowly crush the metal like a soda can. When March rolls around, every single ship in the region completely abandons the area.

 For half a year, the Antarctic Ocean is completely locked down. No one goes in and nothing comes out. So, let’s recap. We have water that destroys metal. We have an upside-down frozen labyrinth that scrambles sonar. We have underwater ice tornadoes that freeze things on contact. And we have a 6-month window of absolute darkness where the ocean literally crushes ships.

Logically, there shouldn’t be anything capable of surviving here, right? If you know anything about biology, you know that extreme cold usually means extreme emptiness. Look at the center of the Antarctic continent itself. It looks like this, just a whole lot of nothing. There are no plants, no land mammals, and basically zero life outside some microbes and the penguins huddled on the coast.

 So, you’d expect the dark, freezing ocean underneath the ice to be just as dead. But oddly enough, this is where you’d be completely wrong. The ocean underneath the ice shelves is somehow one of the most thriving ecosystems on the entire planet. There are massive sponges, fields of corals, swarms of krill, [music] and thousands of highly specialized predators all living their entire lives in sub-zero water.

 The super cold water that destroys our batteries and snaps our titanium actually holds way more oxygen than warm tropical water. And that massive abundance of oxygen has allowed evolution to do some really weird things. But because we can barely get our cameras down there, we only know about a tiny fraction of what actually exists.

 And the things we have found are straight-up disturbing. Because of the high oxygen levels and the incredibly slow metabolism required to survive in the cold, the animals here don’t stay small. They suffer from a phenomenon known as polar gigantism. If you go to a normal coral reef and look for a sea spider, you’ll find a tiny bug about the size of a fingernail.

 But if you manage to drop a camera down to the Antarctic seafloor, you’ll find sea spiders that look like Yeah, I’m going to have nightmares tonight. They have leg spans over 2 ft wide and creep across the bottom on massive stilt-like legs, using a giant straw-like mouth to suck the insides out of other animals, which is absolutely horrifying.

 And of course, there’s the undisputed king of the Antarctic deep, the colossal squid. This is a 1,000-lb absolute freak of muscle armed with rotating hooks on its tentacles, which means [music] anything it touches is getting completely ripped apart. It has eyes the size of dinner plates, the largest eyes in the entire animal kingdom, just to absorb whatever faint traces of bioluminescent light exist [music] in the pitch-black water.

These monsters are real. They’re down there right now. But here is the craziest part. The colossal squid and the giant sea spiders are just the animals that live on the edges of the Antarctic Ocean. These are the creatures that occasionally venture out into the open water where we can actually spot them, or where they get eaten by sperm whales.

 We have absolutely no idea what lives deep underneath the center of the ice shelves, hundreds of miles away from the open ocean. So, why don’t we just catch some of these deep ice animals and bring them to a lab to study them? Well, before we can even study these animals, there’s another issue. These creatures shouldn’t even be able to exist on the surface.

 In fact, if you try to bring them up, they basically self-destruct. Usually, when you pull a deep-sea fish up to the surface, the lack of pressure causes their swim bladders to expand, which is why they end up looking like this. But pulling an animal out of the Antarctic Ocean triggers an even worse problem.

 Their bodies have evolved over millions of years to function exclusively in super cold sub-zero water. Their proteins, their enzymes, and their entire cellular structure are specifically folded and designed to operate at exactly 28° Fahrenheit. If a scientist catches one of these specialized Antarctic fish and pulls it up to the surface, the water pressure might rise to a normal 40° Fahrenheit.

To us, that’s still freezing cold. To the fish, it’s boiling hot. The slight increase in temperature causes their metabolism to instantly skyrocket. Their bodies demand more oxygen than their gills can process, meaning they essentially suffocate. But, even worse, the heat causes their specialized cold water proteins [music] to literally unravel.

 Their cellular structure breaks down. They literally melt at the molecular level. We’re physically barred from properly studying them. We can’t survive in their environment, [music] and they literally disintegrate in ours. And yet, the ocean under the ice shelves is actually the easy part of Antarctica to reach. When we talk about the Antarctic Ocean, we usually mean the salt water surrounding the continent trapped under the ice shelves.

 But, there’s actually an entirely different aquatic world located dead in the center of the continent buried beneath 2 mi of solid glacial ice. These are the subglacial lakes. Using ground penetrating radar, scientists found out that the bottom of Antarctica looks like this. It’s completely covered in a massive network of freshwater lakes and rivers.

 The largest of these is Lake Vostok. Lake Vostok is massive. It’s roughly the size of Lake Ontario, and it’s buried under 13,000 ft of solid ice. Because of the geothermal heat coming from the Earth’s core and the [music] immense pressure of the ice above it, the water in Lake Vostok remains liquid.

 But, this lake hasn’t seen the sun or breathed the Earth’s atmosphere for an estimated 15 million years. It’s a completely sealed ecosystem sitting right here on Earth. Whatever is living in that water has been completely cut off from the rest of the planet’s evolutionary timeline since before humans even existed. It’s honestly kind of a time capsule.

 And the crazy part is we actually have the technology to drill down there right now. We have thermal drills that can melt through 2 mi of ice. So why haven’t we sent a camera down into Lake Vostok to see what’s swimming around? Well, we actually started drilling. And then we voluntarily stopped. Which for humans is actually incredibly rare.

 Because drilling into a 15 million year-old sealed ecosystem creates a really bad problem. The drills we use to melt through the ice are covered in antifreeze, kerosene, and mechanical lubricants to keep them from freezing and getting stuck. If we punch a hole all the way through the ice and break the seal into Lake Vostok, all of those toxic chemicals will [music] instantly flood into the pristine water.

 And the chemicals are only half the problem. Human technology is covered in modern surface bacteria. Even if we sterilize the drill with radiation, extremophile bacteria can still survive on the metal. If we introduce a single modern microbe into an ecosystem that [music] has been isolated for 15 million years, it would basically trigger the apocalypse for whatever lives down there.

 Our bacteria could instantly outcompete the native life or introduce a pathogen that wipes out the entire lake before we even get to look at it. We’re literally choosing not to explore the most fascinating bodies of water on Earth simply because our very presence would destroy them. But this doesn’t mean scientists have just given up entirely.

 I don’t want to make it sound like we’re completely blind. Scientists are actually down in Antarctica right now doing incredible work. They do drill smaller ice cores in safer areas. They do occasionally manage to drop tiny pencil-shaped cameras down narrow bore holes to look at the water beneath the ice shelves.

 And they do have research bases studying the edges of the continent. We have seen small amphipods swimming around in the dark. We have seen ice worms. But we have to be realistic about the scale of what we’re actually doing. Dropping a tiny camera down a 10-in bore hole through a mile of ice and looking at a 6-ft patch of water for a few hours isn’t exploring the ocean.

 That’s like trying to understand an entire NFL football stadium by looking through a single keyhole on the front door with a flashlight. Sure, you might see a piece of concrete or a discarded hot dog wrapper, but you have absolutely no idea what the stadium actually looks like. And to be fair, a 15-million-year-old hot dog wrapper would be pretty cool.

But you get the point. And even if we did manage to map out a section of the Antarctic seafloor, it wouldn’t matter because the map would instantly be wrong. If you map the Mariana Trench, [music] you can come back 50 years later and the trench will still be exactly where you left it. Rocks don’t move very fast because, well, they’re rocks.

 But the Antarctic Ocean’s coastline is entirely made out of the ice shelves. And ice shelves aren’t static. They’re basically just slow-moving rivers of solid ice. The glaciers on the continent are constantly pushing the ice shelves further out into the ocean. This means the physical geology of the environment is changing [music] every single day.

 An underwater ice canyon that a robotic sub navigated through in 2015 might be completely crushed and gone by 2024. A perfectly safe entry point might move 3 mi to the left and seal itself shut. Eventually, the pressure gets [music] to be too much and massive chunks of the ice shelf snap off into the ocean, creating icebergs the size of small countries.

 When this happens, the entire coastline of the continent instantly changes. You literally cannot make a permanent map of the Antarctic Ocean. Any data you collect is just a temporary snapshot of a frozen world that’s already in the process of erasing itself. So, if the environment is constantly shifting, the pressure is immense, the water is super cold, and the oxygen levels are through the roof, what could actually be living in the most inaccessible trenches entirely covered by the ice shelves? If the colossal squid is what evolution produces on the edges of this

environment, what does it produce in the dead center? There are deep oceanic trenches underneath the Antarctic ice that have never seen a single trace of sunlight. The [music] animals down there have never encountered a human, a submarine, or a plastic bag. Because the water is so cold, metabolism is so slow, and predators are so rare, evolution down there basically runs in slow motion.

 There could be a massive species of jellyfish that just drift in the dark for centuries. There could be entirely unknown branches of cephalopods that make the colossal squid look completely normal. There could be bottom-dwelling scavengers that have grown to horrific sizes [music] simply because they’ve had millions of years of uninterrupted peace to do so. We simply don’t know.

 And honestly, the creepy part about it is how much we literally don’t know. But there’s a very grim possibility that we’ll find out soon. There’s really only one way that humans will ever be able to easily explore the depths of the Antarctic Ocean. The ice shelves have to melt. And as global temperatures rise, that’s exactly what is happening.

Massive sections of the ice shelves are fracturing, >> [music] >> thinning, and collapsing into the sea. If this continues, the ice blocking us will just disappear. We’ll finally be able to send our ships, our submarines, and our cameras down into the deep Antarctic waters without our equipment freezing or getting trapped.

 We’ll finally get to see everything that has been hiding down there. But, if the ice melts, the water warms up. And as we already know, warmer water holds less oxygen. The giant sea spiders, the colossal squids, and all the unknown monsters of the deep rely entirely on that high oxygen water to support their massive bodies and delicate proteins.

 [music] If the water warms up even a few degrees, their metabolisms will spike, they’ll run out of oxygen, >> [music] >> and they’ll suffocate. The ice shelf is essentially a massive vault. It’s the only thing keeping the exact temperatures and the ecosystem [music] inside perfectly balanced. And the sad part about the Antarctic Ocean is the exact same process [music] that will finally allow us to explore it will also completely destroy [music] everything living inside it.

 If we ever do get a clear, easy look at the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean, the super-cooled [music] ecosystem won’t even exist anymore. We’ll finally have the access, but we won’t have anything left to look at. We’ll just be looking at an empty graveyard. So, as frustrating as it is that we can’t see what’s down there, maybe it’s actually for the best that the most inaccessible place on Earth stays exactly that, inaccessible.

 But anyways, I’m personally completely fine leaving those giant sea spiders down there in the dark forever. Thank you guys for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this one. Please leave some suggestions in the comments for what you want to see next, because I really do read them, and it helps a lot. Also, if you haven’t seen my second channel yet, Beyond the Green, make sure to check that out, too, if you want a break from the ocean.