200 Years of Discovery: What Antarctica Told People About the History of Earth and Mars

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1820 - that is, two hundred years ago - the Russian navigators Bellingshausen and Lazarev discovered a new continent, when humanity had already decided that it knew everything about the continents on Earth and that there could only be islands at the pole. It was called Antarctica (that is, anti-Arctic, opposite to the Arctic), and since then it has given us many scientific discoveries.

Crimson rivers are not necessarily in the Apocalypse

In 1911, Australian geologist Griffith Taylor stumbled upon an ominous-looking waterfall. Seeing the blood-red stream, he first of all decided to explain it to himself with red algae - just to very quickly find a reasonable explanation for something that looked so mystical. Later it turned out that Taylor was wrong and no algae had anything to do with it. The water in the stream takes on an intense red color due to the large amount of … rust. It contains a lot of iron, and it rusts from contact with water and air.

And iron gets into the water as a waste product of microorganisms living in an invisible subglacial lake. Since they do not see sunlight there, they get out as best they can and their metabolism differs from the metabolism of many other microorganisms. But the waterfall is still called Bloody, and this is official.

Once upon a time the climate on earth was completely different

In the eighties, the first remains of dinosaurs were found in Antarctica, and already in our time - traces of a burnt down giant forest. Fossilized plant trunks with traces of fire are about 250 million years old. Apparently, the same fires that destroyed the forests of Antarctica killed the dinosaurs that inhabited them. There are two theories of what caused the fires - an asteroid fall or a volcanic eruption. But in any case, the remains of forests and dinosaurs tell us that once the climate of Antarctica was much more pleasant. Like, probably, on the whole earth.

The world could be hit by a big eruption again

Ninety-one volcanoes are hidden under the ice sheet of the mainland, and how much they are capable of acting, scientists in most cases cannot say. However, they are very alarmed that the global melting of the ice sheet could cause several dozen eruptions. This number of eruptions can cause a "volcanic winter" and several deadly earthquakes in southern Africa and South America. A volcanic winter will inevitably lead to massive crop failures and famine - this has happened more than once in human history, for example, in the early nineteenth century due to the Tamborough volcano and in the sixth century due to two eruptions on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Even in Antarctica, flowers bloom

The climate of the southernmost continent is incredibly harsh, and in order to survive, most plants "dry out" themselves, trying to keep as little water as possible in their cages. It is not surprising that mainly mosses and lichens grow on the harsh rocks of Antarctica. But there are also two flowering plants on the mainland: the Antarctic meadow and the colobantus whale. They are not unique in the sense that they are found not only in Antarctica - they can also be seen in the very south of South America, as well as on some of the cold islands of the Southern Hemisphere.

Recently, meadowsweet and colobantus have expanded their range in Antarctica twenty-five times, and this is very alarming for scientists, showing how much warmer it has become and how much more intensely the ice sheet will soon melt. Since it contains 90% of the world's ice, its melting will lead to such a rise in sea levels that it will flood, for example, Britain.

There was life on Mars

In 1996, scientists said that a meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica proves that, at least for a while, there was life on Mars - in the form of bacteria. Traces of these bacteria are found on meteorites, and they are similar to some terrestrial bacteria. Most likely, they lived at a time when there was still liquid water on the surface of the Red Planet. Later, in 2014, evidence of an Antarctic rock was confirmed by a rover that detected organic compounds in mined samples of Martian rocks. And the meteorite from Mars itself was found in Antarctica in 1984.

Mosquitoes don't need wings

In general, of course, mosquitoes live better with wings than without them, but the unique species of mosquitoes belgica antarctica discovered in Antarctica does well without them. By the way, this same mosquito is the largest true land animal on the mainland. Anything larger prefers to live half in the water.

The mosquito was discovered back in 1900. It was discovered by a Belgian entomologist - hence the name. Mosquitoes reach a length of three millimeters, and if it seems to you that this is not enough, then their genome is also very small, one of the smallest insects in the world, smaller than that of a body louse or Drosophila. In general, Antarctic mosquitoes are very simple guys. And they don't fly.

But what they did not open was the Nazi bases

In Antarctica, Hitler and his henchmen certainly could not hide. Not that there is nowhere - only recently Ukrainian polar explorers have found another giant cave with its own lake, and there are many such large caves. But Antarctica is constantly being removed from the air, and in all places where people could settle for a long time, scientists endlessly walk with modern technology that allows them to find places warmer than others, cavities under ice or ground, and so on. Even the abandoned base could not have remained unnoticed.

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