The ice of our planet contains many secrets that we still have to unravel. What has been found - strikes the imagination, and only spurs interest for further searches.
With global climate change, the eternal ice of the North and South poles of the Earth is gradually melting, and the ancient glaciers every year present us with new surprises. Some of the discoveries become delightful clues to the mysteries of the human past, return to us objects lost in time or tell about incredible anomalies that even the world's most famous scientists are unable to explain.
Giant Virus In 2014, in the eternal ice of Siberia, researchers discovered a virus called Pithovirus, which had been dormant in the cold for nearly 30,000 years, and it turned out to be a truly gigantic non-cellular infectious agent. The find is recognized as unique, because Pithovirus is the largest representative of viruses known to modern science.
In addition, virions found in the Arctic are genetically much more complex than conventional viruses. Pitovirus contains 500 genes. By the way, discovered in 2013, Pandoravirus, now recognized as the second largest virus on the planet, has as many as 2,500 genes. For comparison, HIV contains only 12 genes. Even more creepy, after 30,000 years of hibernation, the giant virion is still active and capable of infecting amoeba cells. Many scientists believe that it is extremely difficult to become infected with this prehistoric virus today, although under optimal conditions such a danger is still possible. For example, if you find the body of a person who has died from this infection. Such a scenario is very unlikely, but the very idea that unknown and potentially dangerous microorganisms are hiding in eternal ice, awaiting their discovery day,makes some experts worry in earnest.
Ice Maiden Inca Ice Maiden, Peru The mummy of a girl of 14-15 years old was found on the slope of the Nevado-Sabankaya volcano in the vastness of Peru, moreover, in 1999. Experts suggest that this teenager and several other children were selected for sacrifice because of their beauty. Three mummies were found, which, unlike the embalmed Egyptian "colleagues", were deep-frozen. The body of a seven-year-old boy was also subjected to study, but scientists have not yet dared to investigate the remains of a six-year-old girl. Probably, she was once struck by lightning, which may affect the accuracy of the research results.
Most likely, three children were sacrificed, as evidenced by the artifacts next to them: gold, silver, clothes, bowls of food and an extravagant headdress made of white feathers of unknown birds.
Historians suggest that children were chosen by the Incas for their beauty. In the course of previous studies it was found that before sacrificing them, children were fed “elite” foods for a year - maize and dried llama meat.
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Mummy of Princess Ukok, Altai
This mummy was nicknamed "Altai Princess" and it is assumed that Ukoka died in the 5-3 centuries BC and belongs to the Pazyryk culture of the Altai Territory.
Mummy boy, Greenland
An entire family was discovered in 1972 near the Greenlandic settlement of Kilakitsok, located on the west coast of the largest island in the world, mummified through low temperatures. This boy was not even a year old when his life left him. Scientists have established that he was sick with down syndrome.
Ice Man, Alps
The Similaun man, whose age at the time of discovery was about 5300 years, which made him the oldest European mummy, received the nickname Ötzi from scientists. Discovered on September 19, 1991 by a couple of German tourists while walking through the Tyrolean Alps, stumbled upon the remains of a resident of the Chalcolithic era, perfectly preserved thanks to the natural ice mummification, he made a splash in the scientific world - nowhere in Europe have they found ideally extant bodies of our distant ancestors.
Juanita of the Peruvian Andes
Thanks to the cold peaks of the Andes, the mummy has been preserved very well and now it belongs to the Museum of the Andean Sanctuaries in Ariquepe, but it often moves around the world in a special sarcophagus.
Frozen Mammoth
On the islands of the Novosibirsk archipelago, they found the carcass of a female mammoth, well preserved in the ice. In addition to soft tissues, the researchers got another valuable "gift" - the blood of a mammoth. Surprisingly, it did not freeze at a temperature of -10 degrees, and scientists suggest that it was this feature that helped mammoths survive in the cold.
Mammoth Yuka
The mammoth was found near the Laptev Sea and was named Yuka. Scientists believe that Yuka died (yes, experts are inclined to believe that it was a female) at least 10 thousand years ago at the age of two and a half years: her tusks were just beginning to erupt.
Wreckage of Sigismund Levanevsky's plane found in the Arctic
The expedition of the Russian Geographical Society accidentally discovered wreckage on Yamal, which may belong to the H-209 aircraft of the Glavsevmorput pilot Sigismund Levanevsky. The plane, along with the crew, disappeared without a trace in August 1937. No human remains were found. Perhaps the pilots left the cockpit, but did not reach the people, Fandyushin suggested. He said that members of the Russian Geographical Society are planning to set off on a new expedition in March-April to examine the find in detail.
Remains of WWI soldiers in the Alps
In connection with the melting of the ice, the soldiers of the First World War begin to surface. In 2014, the remains of 80 soldiers killed during the First World War were found in the melted alpine ice, almost all of them are well preserved, turned into mummies.
Together with them, photographs of the war years, maps and even food were found that were perfectly preserved in the cold. The soldiers were given a real military funeral. The main task now is to preserve this heritage.
Frozen baby woolly rhinoceros
For the first time in the history of paleontology, Yakut paleontologists have found partially preserved remains of a baby woolly rhinoceros, buried under permafrost about 10 thousand years ago, which will help them understand how these animals survived in a harsh glacial climate.
Recently, humanity has been increasingly directing its gaze into space, but there are still many unexplored corners on Earth, and one of these places, rich in enchanting secrets, is the Arctic Circle and Antarctica. The eternal ice continues to melt, and this process allows incredible discoveries to be made, which can be delightful, mysterious or even terrifying.
The Ruthless North can be a very formidable and intimidating place, because we still don't know so much about it. Scientists and conspiracy theorists constantly argue and ridicule each other for their differences of opinion on most of the mysteries of the Arctic. Whether it's traces of alien civilizations or unexplained natural phenomena, regions of eternal cold continue to haunt the minds of researchers and theorists struggling to unravel the most interesting discoveries emerging from under the ice with enviable consistency.
Perhaps we will not get answers to all our questions soon, and most of the secrets of the North will remain unsolved, but this is not a reason to turn a blind eye to them.
Giant sea spiders
Sea spiders, which in the scientific community are more often called pantopods, pycnogonids or multi-genera (pantopoda, pycnogonida), usually inhabit the Caribbean and the Mediterranean region, but the largest individuals of this species have been found even in some areas of Antarctica and the Arctic. These amazing creatures are a prime example of polar gigantism, a phenomenon that scientists have been trying to explain for a very long time. No one is exactly sure why these spiders and many other creatures living in the coldest regions of our planet grow so large. One theory suggests that the lack of oxygen in the ice water may be the cause.
In the coldest seas, giant sea spiders grow up to 90 centimeters in length. However, despite their impressive size and eerie appearance, these creatures are absolutely harmless, and technically they belong rather to a separate class of marine cheliceraids than to arachnids.
Long-nosed chimera
Rhinochimaeridae, better known as the long-nosed chimera, is one of the rarest fish species on Earth, and was caught only 2 times in history, and the second time it was caught by a fisherman in the icy waters of the Davis Strait in northern Canada. So rarely does this sea creature get caught in the net for a fairly simple reason - an amazing fish usually swims at depths from 200 to 1900 meters, and for humans this is not the most accessible environment.
It is not surprising that for her long nose the rare chimera was nicknamed Pinocchio. In addition, it is often confused with the rhinoceros shark due to the similarity of their mouths and noses. That is why the long-nosed chimera is often mistakenly called a ghost shark. In fact, the deep-sea chimera belongs to the chimera-nosed family of the class of cartilaginous fish. An interesting distinctive feature is that an extremely poisonous thorn grows in front of the first dorsal fin of the fish, which usually serves as protection from predators, and this dangerous process easily folds into a special notch when nothing threatens the chimera.
Melting eternal ice can provoke new viral epidemics
Global climatic changes have long been the cause of the intensified melting of the polar ice. The size of the glaciers of the Arctic Ocean decreases more and more every summer. As a result, due to the unusually warm weather, melting glaciers are releasing microbes that have hibernated for centuries.
In August 2016, an unexpected outbreak of anthrax caused the death of a 12-year-old boy and hospitalization of 72 fellow villagers. The cause of the epidemic was the contamination of local groundwater with the cadaveric juices of thawed deer, who once died just from this dangerous infection. The Siberians suffered because all the drinking water in the village was poisoned.
And here is another precedent - in Norway, the bodies of 6 young men who died in 1918 from the Spanish flu were discovered, and a perfectly preserved virus was found in the blood of the dead. Among experts there is concern that the frozen graves of smallpox victims in the future will also cause outbreaks of the deadly virus.
These puppies are 12,000 years old
In 2001, researchers who traveled to the northeast of Yakutia hoping to find the remains of ancient mammoths there, found there perfectly preserved remains of puppies from the Ice Age. Five years later, Sergei Fedorov, an employee of the World Mammoth Museum at Northeastern Federal University, went to the site of the discovery of the ancient puppy and found there not one, but two well-preserved bodies of animals from the Ice Age.
Frozen puppies can theoretically help scientists find out when and where exactly dogs split into a separate subspecies of wolves and became the first tame animals in human history. The study of the finds showed that the puppies died at the age of about 3 months, and they died, most likely, having fallen into an avalanche. Scientists are going to use the remains of discovered animals for research on the chronology of domestication of this species, because so far in the scientific community there is still no consensus about the timing and place where dogs were first tamed by humans.
Secret Nazi base in the Arctic
In October 2016, Russian scientists discovered a secret Nazi base in the Arctic. An object called Schatzbraber or "Treasure Hunter" was found on the island of Alexandra Land, and it was built about a year after the German invasion of Russia.
Apparently, the base was completely empty in 1944 when Nazi scientists poisoned themselves with polar bear meat. The second time people appeared here as much as 72 years later. Russian polar explorers discovered about 500 different artifacts at the base, including rusty bullets and documents from the Second World War, all of which were hidden in bunkers for many years. The base has been kept in excellent condition due to extremely low temperatures.
There are versions that the object was created to search for some ancient relics and sources of power, in the existence of which Adolf Hitler himself believed. Although more skeptical experts believe that the secret base provided the Nazis with weather information, which could give Germany significant advantages in planning the movement of its troops, ships and submarines. The Russians are now using this island to build their own military base.
100-year-old photos from Antarctica
In 2013, experts from the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust were working to restore an old research base and discovered a box with 22 undeveloped negatives from 100 years ago. The photographs were taken by famed explorer Ernest Shackleton during an expedition to the Ross Sea, and have waited for almost a century to be finally rescued from the ice and developed. The famous research group intended to travel around Antarctica and make a drop of supplies for Shackleton. However, the mission was thwarted, because several members of the expedition, including the eminent figure of the "heroic age of Antarctic research", unexpectedly got stuck on Ross Island, where they almost died. Their ship was carried out to sea during severe weather,but then the group was still saved.
A photographer from Wellington, New Zealand has taken on the development of old negatives and the result is right in front of you. Obviously, the old images were slightly affected by extreme weather conditions, but they still represent an amazing echo of the legendary polar exploration and learn more about the expedition 100 years ago.
A gravity anomaly found in Antarctica under an ice sheet
In December 2016, scientists discovered a huge object hidden under the eternal ice of Antarctica. The discovery was made in the Wilkes Land area, and it is an anomalous area with a diameter of about 300 meters, occurring at a depth of approximately 823 meters. The find was called the Wilkes Land gravitational anomaly, and it was discovered in a crater with a diameter of 500 kilometers thanks to observations from NASA satellites in 2006.
Many researchers speculate that the huge anomaly is all that remains of a giant prehistoric asteroid. It was probably 2 times (or, according to other sources, 6 times) larger than the asteroid, due to which the dinosaurs once became extinct. Researchers also believe that it was this celestial body that caused the global catastrophe that provoked the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago, when 96% of marine life and about 70% of land creatures died.
As always, conspiracy theorists are of a different opinion. Many of them believe that this crater was once either an underground base of aliens, or a secret refuge of the fallen angels from the Bible, or even a portal to the inner part of the Earth, where there is a separate world (the hypothesis of a hollow Earth).
Mysterious arctic civilization
In 2015, 29 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, scientists discovered traces of a mysterious medieval civilization. Despite the fact that the find was made in the region of Siberia, archaeologists have established that this people was related to Persia.
The remains were wrapped in furs (presumably bear or wolverine skins), birch bark, and covered with copper objects. In permafrost conditions, bodies in such a "wrapper" were literally mummified, and therefore perfectly preserved to this day. In total, at the site of the medieval site, researchers found 34 small graves and 11 bodies.
Initially, it was believed that only men and children were buried there, but in August 2017, scientists discovered that among the mummies there is also a body that once belonged to a woman. Scientists nicknamed her the Polar Princess. Researchers believe that this girl belonged to the high class, since she is so far the only representative of the fair sex discovered during these excavations. Work with artifacts is still ongoing, so it is possible that there are still many amazing discoveries ahead of us.
The mystery of the warships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus
The bomber ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus were re-equipped specifically to participate in the infamous missing expedition to explore the Arctic led by Sir John Franklin (1845-1847). Both ships, commanded by Franklin, set out on a voyage through the unexplored regions of the Far North, but in the Canadian territories they were captured by ice, and none of the 129 crew members, including the captain himself, never returned home.
In 1981-1982, new expeditions were undertaken, the purpose of which was to explore the King William Island, Beechey Island. There, scientists discovered the bodies of some of the members of the Franklin expedition, perfectly preserved to this day thanks to the process of natural mummification. According to the conclusion of forensic experts, the cause of death of these polar explorers was poisoning with poor-quality canned food, tuberculosis and severe weather conditions incompatible with life. As a result of the examination of the remains, the experts also concluded that the members of the Franklin expedition at some point literally went mad from exhaustion and even began to eat each other - suspicious cuts and serifs were found on their bodies, evidence in favor of cannibalism.
Then on September 12, 2014, an expedition in the Victoria Strait area discovered the wreckage of the HMS Erebus, and exactly 2 years later (September 12, 2016), HMS Terror was also found by members of the Arctic Research Foundation, and almost perfectly condition.
