TOP 15 STRANGEST Discoveries in Ice

bundle up and ready your ice axes as we delve into these astonishing Frozen fins let's begin with number 15 an entire mountain range in 1958 a Soviet Expedition uncovered an entire mountain range buried under 600 M of ice and Antarctica the gamertv mountain range is absolutely massive it extends for about 1250 km and has Peaks as high as 3390 m in altitude this makes the mountain range about as large as the European Alps yet despite its size it's hard to reach location Under Ice means that scientists know pretty much nothing about its features number 14

gold While most gold is located underground melting glaciers have revealed new deposits during the last ice age glaciers often transported gold-bearing rocks some of those golden rocks have become Frozen inside the glaciers and while the gold is usually scattered throughout as sediment they've begun to reveal significant and quantities of gold when the glacier melts as global warming continues glacial streams will likely see an uptick in Gold volume allowing some Prospectors to strike a rich if they get the timing just right number 13 a new dinosaur species in 1986 Argentinian geologists Eduardo Alero and Roberto scasso

found a new species of dinosaur on an expedition to Antarctica's James Ross Island they found the bones of an ankylosaur under the ice and while it took an entire decade to excavate the fossil thanks to the ground Frost and the harsh weather they uncovered a new species that's now called antarctopelta or Antarctic shield in English to date this one fossil is the only specimen of the species that's ever been found number 12 Yuka the mammoth in 2010 a group of Siberian Tusk hunters came across one of the world's most incredible Ice Age relics known as

Yuka she was a woolly mammoth that roamed the icy Tundra about 39,000 years ago she likely met her end after falling into a swamp and getting stuck and it's due to this unique position that her lowered body was almost perfectly preserved in fact it's in such good condition that scientists were able to extract flowing blood as it turns out that Mammoth blood has a natural antifreeze Yuka is now displayed in Moscow and would certainly be worth visiting on the next trip to the city number 11 a box of jewels in 2013 a French alpinist was

hiking across the glacier on Mon Blanc when he spotted a metal box in the ice the Box said Made in India and upon opening it he found it filled with about a 100 colorful gems consisting of a mix of sapphires emeralds and rubies upon further investigation it was discovered that the jewels had come from a crash Indian Airlines flight from either 1950 or 1966 however despite searching authorities were able to find the original owner as a result the decision was made to split the jewels in half with both the alpinist and the OWN owners of

the land leading to the alpinist going home with a cool $340,000 number 10 grasshoppers so while Grasshoppers and Glaciers are two things that don't seem very compatible you can get two of them in one in the US state of Montana located within the Beartooth mountains of kuster national forest the so-called grasshopper Glacier is far different than the typical white glaciers that's because it's got a grayish color and this is because it has tens of millions of locusts located inside of it now I'm not entirely sure how they got in there but there are a couple

of theories the most popular is that the centuries ago a swarm of billions of them were migrating over the Rocky Mountains when they suddenly were trapped by a massive winter storm the ice then froze some of the Trap specimens in time creating the incredible site that's there today now grasshopper Glacier as it came to be known caught the attention of scientists after being discovered in the early 1900s by geologist JP Kimble when he sent samples of the insect species to the US Bureau of Entomology in 1914 it was discovered that they were Rocky Mountain locusts

this was a species that went extinct over a century ago likely due to their seeds being overrun by the plows of farmers in the American West thus this discovering was a scientific treasure as the freezing light to locusts being very well preserved and the grasshopper Glacier isn't the only Locust filed Glacier around in fact until the late 20th century finding frozen grasshopper remains was pretty common however lower snowfall rates since the late 1980 and higher temperatures have caused many similar glaciers to melt so if you want to see grasshopper Glacier for yourself I'd suggest making

the trip sooner rather than later now getting there is quite the Trek after all you have to use an off-road vehicle for a part of the way and then Trek for several hours with this often being in the face of bad weather and it is because of this that the glacier is only considered to be accessible from Late July to September making it a difficult yet worthwhile sight to visit number nine Allen Hills 88401 while the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs may be the most famous space Rock Allen Hills 841 is a close second

discovered in the Allen Hills ice field of Antarctica in 1984 the 1.9 kg Ignus rock is thought to have crystallized from magma on Mars about 4 and2 billion years ago and later to have been shocked and altered perhaps by one or more nearby meteoroid or asteroid impacts into what it is today by our estimates it was formed as part of the crust on Mar about 4 billion years ago it stayed there until about 17 million years ago and then after an asteroid hit Mars it went spinning into space from there it zipped around for many

years before eventually Landing in Antarctica about 13,000 years ago while this makes the rock old and interesting its age is far from its most controversial attribute you see in 1996 NASA scientists who carried out microscopic and chemical analyses on the meteorite made a shocking suggestion that the strange carbonet in the meteorite had been produced used by Martian microorganisms after all the Carbonic grains that were observed are associated with organic compounds and contain minute crystals of iron minerals similar in size and shape to those produced by bacteria if this hypothesis was true this would mean that

in all likelihood there was Life on Mars given we haven't found definitive proof of that so far this would have been to put it lightly a big deal however in subsequent investigations other scientists refuted these claims they instead said the carbonate grains could be explained by non-biological process in 2022 these naysayers were proven right as an authoritative report in the Journal of science confirmed that the carbonate grains were not Signs of Life instead they were created by water now this shouldn't Dash your hopes yet after all there is still good science that suggests that Mars

may have once been hospitable to life however given the planet's current state the chance of any life being found on Mars today is slim to none and while this makes this piece of Space Rock a lot less exciting it can still be visited today at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History number eight a baby mammoth ked's Yukon Territory is known for its gold deposits and on a rainy day in June of 2022 minor Travis mudrey was working away to extract some since the mines are covered in permafrost he had to dig into a wall of

hard Frozen dirt and while doing so he made a crazy Discovery inside the mck he spotted a dark shiny animal with short legs suspecting he'd found a mummified baby buffalo mudrey began inspecting the creature however he was in for a shock after he realized that the animal had a trunk upon showing his boss all work was stopped and the experts were called in while Grant zazula the Yukon government's paleontologist wasn't able to arrive right away he sent two geologists who rushed to the creek surveyed the site and retrieved The Remains less than an hour before

a storm struck once secure the mammoth was wrapped in a tarp and brought to a nearby location for a ceremony with scientists miners politicians and First Nations Elders gathered in a circle the elders offered a blessing and named the mammoth nunoa which means big baby animal in their language after a quick examination they ruled that nunoa was female who was probably about a month old when she passed away more than 30,000 years ago based on where she was found it's more than likely that she was grazing with her mother when she strayed from her mother's

side and got stuck in the mud leading to her death now the reason why nunoa was so well preserved is likely due to her quick passing and the unique location of her final moments you see in most parts of the world only the fossilized bones of Ice Age creatures remain however in the Yukon permafrost acts as a sort of freezer preserving soft tissues like muscle skin and hair alongside the important information like DNA it's because of this that in recent decades miners in territory have Unearthed the well-preserved remains of several different animals with their findings

including a wolf pup a caribou calf and giant camels in any case Nuno GA now holds the title of being the first complete baby woolly mammoth found in North America and only the second in the world as such her Discovery was an incredible Stroke of Luck and of great importance to the scientific and archaeological Community moving on to number seven an ac53 Sky Trooper Dakota on November 18th of 1946 a c-53 sky Trooper Dakota took off from tullen Air Base near Vienna Austria Bound for Pisa in Northern in Italy the plane was carrying several high-ranking

Allied officers and their families and so in order to play it safe captain Ralph Tate Jr decided to take a two-day long route that would take them through Munich and Marseilles in order to avoid bad weather this ended up being an ill-advised plan that's because somewhere around inbrook the plane got caught in bad weather anyways causing the pilots to become disoriented and go off course they knew they were in the Alps because Tate had to dodge several mountain peaks however they mistakenly thought they were in the French Alps and not the Austrian Alps at some

point a downdraft sent them towards yet another Peak and in order to save everyone on board Tate intentionally dropped the airplane pancaking it onto the goalie Glacier the plane skidded on its belly uphill for a short while before thankfully getting stuck in a snow bank this slowdown caused the plane to stop a few hundred meters short of a deep crass ensuring that everyone remained safe the good news was that only the serious injury among the passengers was a compound leg fracture the bads news was that 12 of them were now stuck about 3200 M up

in the Alps in late November thankfully though despite the rough Landing of the radio still worked however because the radio signals deflected off the mountains the B7 bombers sent to look for them didn't pick them up it was because of this that it took a grand total of 3 days for the US and British Air Forces to locate the lost plane with the eventual finder being According to some sources none other than the captain's dad who spotted the plane after he sent up a flare with the help of local Swiss Alpine soldiers all the passengers

who were aboard were saved giving this story a happy ending so this leaves us with the obvious question what happened to the plane well after the incident the plane was simply left on the glacier and mostly forgotten about however in 2012 three University students from Canada found the C- 53's propeller while hiking the glacier they first thought it was a log protruding from the ice but after investigating realized that it was a plane propeller this find soon grabbed local headlines and as the glacier continues to melt it's likely that it will reveal more and more

relics from this crash number six Antarctic Ice holes in October of 2017 scientists were in for a shock when a strange hole opened up in the middle of Antarctica's winter sea ice now what made this hole so shocking is that it was very atypical massive in size it was about as large as the US state of Maine and seemingly come out of nowhere as you might imagine scientists got to studying it and they soon determined that it was a poia in essence a poia forms because the deep water in that part of the Southern Ocean

is warmer and saltier than the surface water ocean currents can at times bring the warmer water upwards where it melts the blankets of ice that had formed on the ocean surface that melting created the polum to make matters worse since the waters in the hole is continuously exposed to the atmosphere above it makes it difficult for new ice layers to form while we know how polas work there's still a lot of mystery surrounding them first and foremost they tend to occur on the coast where ice is close to non-frozen seawater however in this case the

poia opened up very deep in the interior of the continent puzzling scientists we still have little idea of what long-term impacts of a poia are and whether they can cause serious harm to the local environment there are even suggestions that they may be linked to climate change although this is yet to be definitively proven using data from satellites autonomous floats and tag to marine animals the team determined that a turbulent Eddy around mod rise brought more salt into the sea which was then transferred to the surface through a process called emman transport they then determin

that the polyas formed in this way can have quite the impact as they can change how water moves around and how currents carry heat towards Antarctica number five iron AG skis while humans from the Iron Age were far different than we are today one thing that they did have was was above all things skis and in 2014 a team of scientists found a single archaic ski in Norway's National Park 7 years later a matching ski was found just a few meters away and in even better condition than its counterpart now it's worth mentioning that skis

have a rather long history the archaeological record suggests that hunters in Europe and Asia began using skis to chase game around the end of the last ice age about 11,000 years ago to take the oldest confirmed ski which was onar in Russia is a about 8,000 years old and periodically archaeologists in Scandinavia have found wooden skis and ski likee artifacts to date as early as 3200 BC now the skis in question are no older than what we found before in fact they're believed to be a relatively young set at just 1300 years old what makes

them stand out and earn a spot on this list is the condition measuring in at about 188 cm long and about 18 cm wide the skis are sizable and according to the measurement the second ski is slightly larger than the first according to archaeologist Lars pilo of Norway's Glacier archaeology program quote the skis are not identical but we should not expect them to be the skis are handmade not mass-produced they have a long and individual history of wear and repair before iron aged skiers use them together and they ended up in the ice end quote

beyond their size the skis are also notable for their features both have raised footh holes leather straps and twisted birch bark Bindings that would have been attached through holes in the footholds it's believed that the the Ski's owner was a hunter traveler or both and the find shows that despite being geographically remote the high mountains of Southern Norway were teeming with activity 1300 years ago it seems like this set of skis is also a bit different than what has typically been found after the discovery of the first ski the team wondered whether its Underside had

once been lined with fur this would have been done theoretically to give the skis more grip however the new skis seemed to have a Furrow like those found on some other ancient and modern skis this furrow would have no purpose if covered with fur leading researchers to believe that the skis didn't feature any of it number four ancient viruses while it may sound crazy it turns out that viruses can survive under ice for thousands of years now it's practically impossible to know how many ancient viruses are frozen and how many have already been quietly Unleashed

however there are some that scientists have picked up on it's worth noting that so far scientists have only studied permafrost viruses that infect single cell organisms called amibas this because the viruses are harmless and provide a good model for those others that may be lurking under the ice as put by computational biologist Jee Michelle clavier we will never risk isolating a virus eventually capable of infecting modern mammals we do not have any formal proof that viruses other than amoeba specific viruses could survive as long but there would be no reason why not because all viruses

basically have the same property of being inert particles while outside their host cells we do not wish to take the immense risk of starting a new pandemic with unknown zombie viruses from the distant past just to demonstrate that we're right end quote so here's some of the so-called safe viruses that have been found so far one is pytho virus cyber isum considered to be one of the largest viruses ever found this 1.5 mm long monstrosity is a thick walled oval with an opening at one end a cork structure as a cap and a honeycomb like

grid now this virus was discovered inside a core of an ancient Siberian permafrost in the Russian Far East and it's believed to be about 30,000 years old mavirus cisum is a second virus that's quite similar to the first found in the same 30,000 Yee old Siberian permafrost sample it's a slightly smaller one and protected by a hairy outer layer what's interesting about this one is that if infects an amoeba it can produce and release 200 to 300 new viral particles for every single virus while it also poses no danger to humans or other animals the

discovery of two ancient viruses in a single sample suggests that dormant pathogens often lur in permafrost however the oldest virus found in permafrost so far is Pandora virus yedoma dating back to 48,500 years ago it was found in icy deposits in the Russian Far East and it's notable for having a large egg-shaped particle that measures in at 1 micrometer in length now while all these viruses are kind of cool their great variability means it's also that quite likely a few of them will be dangerous after all there is a very real chance that the next

covid or SARS is hiding deep in that ice if the ice melts it could infect those in the north of our planet before heading south catching most of the planet by surprise as such it's important that we constantly monitor new viruses in the Arctic to make sure that this terrifying possibility does not become a reality number three Glacier girl on July 15th of 1942 a squadron of six P38 Lightning fighter planes and two B7 Flying Fortress bombers got caught in a blizzard while flying from Greenland to the British Isles as a result they had no

choice but to turn back and conduct an emergency landing on the glaciers of Greenland while all of the crew members were rescued 9 days later the aircraft were left behind for some reason or another they were never retrieved over the course of the war and instead they sat there for decades over this time period the ever shifting ice sheets buried the aircraft under 75 to 90 M of ice however despite their remote hard-to-reach location 50 years later the decision was made to extract one of the P38 fighters from the ice nicknamed Glacier girl the effort

was pretty huge taking a whopping 11 years and about $2 million the crew had to spend a lot of time and effort to lift the plane out of the ice this excavation was possible because they made use of a large heat plate which melted the ice and allowed them to Tunnel down to the aircraft from there a cavern was cleared out around on the plane with blasts of hot water allowing individual pieces to be resurfaced surprisingly the plane was in decent condition while the canopy was crushed by the ice all parts were more or less

in place after a half million doll repair effort the plane was in workable condition and in October of 2002 she embarked on our first flight however it was on June 22nd 2007 that the glacier girl went on a rather ambitious flight the plan was that she would depart from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and attempt to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to duck exford in England with the idea being she would complete the flight that she had begun 65 years earlier however on June 28th a coolant leak in the right engine grounded the plane in

Goose Bay which is a town in northeastern Canada in any case the successful excavation of Glacier girl made it seem like the second plane could be recovered and in 2011 an effort began to do just that with the help of ground penetrating radar mounted onto drones the team involved were able to detect one of the p38s and determin that it was a plane known as Echo by its Pilots as of 2018 the plan was to go to Greenland in 2019 and use the same heating strategy that was used in '92 to excavate it however to

date there seems to be no confirmation online as to whether or not the excavation of this second plane actually occurred number two uty when you think of a mummy the long gone rulers and Nobles of ancient Egypt are probably the ones who come to mind however in 1991 a frozen mummy of sorts was found high up in the mountain The Story Goes that two German tourists were hiking in the otel Alps on the border of Austria and Italy when they came across a mummy after being extracted The Mummy was examined at the University of inbrook

and rather incredibly he was soon nicknamed uty and determined to be the oldest natural mummy in Europe after further examination he was determined to have lived somewhere between 3350 and 3105 BC making him more than 5,000 years old while this should have led to decomposition the extremely cold temperatures in the Alps preserved it incredibly well the scientists involved were able to figure out that uty was about 5'2 left-handed wore a size eight shoe and had brown eyes dark brown hair and tan skin suggesting that he was of Southern European Heritage despite being located in the

Alps unfortunately he was in pretty bad shape physically as he was lactose intolerant had a rare genetic anomaly that prevented his 12 pair of ribs from forming and he also suffered from cavities intestinal par parites and lime disease and had a sore back alongside sore knees hips and shoulders meaning he likely lived in continuous pain despite all this he still decided to hike through the Alps and by all accounts his journey seemed pretty frantic scientists were able to find his belongings and figured out he was dressed in warm clothes however it appears that all he

carried was a backpack axe dagger a bow arrows and a small quantity of food as a result it seems like he must have been hunting and Gathering as he made his way through this Rocky terrain it's also also worth mentioning that while the remains were examined in Austria both the remains and his paraphernalia are now located in Italy the reasons for this have to do with geopolitics you see at the Treaty of St Germaine and Le in 1919 the border between North tyrol in Austria and South tyrol in Italy was defined as the Watershed of

the rivers in an edch however the glacier watsi was found on had since retreated complicating the decision as to whether to find the site was Italian or Austrian in 91 land surveys were conducted and while it was determined that while UT's fine sight drains to the Austrian side the body was actually located 93 m inside Italy thankfully both sides agreed to be civil while the Italians allowed inbrook University to finish the scientific examinations from 98 onwards uty has been on display in Italy's South Tyrone Museum of archaeology number one the HMS investigator in 1848 Sir

John Franklin officially disappeared given his status as a famous Arctic Explorer it caused quite the commotion and soon Britain's Arctic Council began setting up search parties and offering large sums of reward money in order to find him while some Clues were found it wasn't until July of 2010 that most of the mystery was solved for a bit of context at around this time the British Navy was very much invested in finding the Northwest Passage while it was only fabled to exist The Hope Was That by finding a way to get from the Atlantic to the

Pacific through the Arctic she shipping between the two oceans could be far faster after all during this time period the Panama Canal didn't exist yet forcing ships to sail around the bottom of South America given the fact that this was rather dangerous The Hope was that a Northwest Passage would be far safer the expedition of Sir John Franklin was one of the attempts made in order to find this Seaway in 1845 a 59-year-old Franklin and his crew embarked on the journey with their ships known as the HMS arabus and HMS Terror right from the get-go

there were problems after all the food was improperly sealed leading to much of it to get contaminated with lead and while the crew managed to make it through the winter of 1845 in 46 the boats got stuck in the ice while the ships had what should have been 3 years of Provisions the contamination made much of it inedible and after two years with no news sir Franklin's wife asked the British admiralty to conduct a search all the searches didn't come up with much only written evidence to ever be found was the so-called Victory Point note

written in two parts it recounted how the crew spent years trapped in the ice from 1846 to 48 unfortunately the second part of the note recounts that Sir John Franklin passed away on June 11th of 1847 and it's believed that this note itself was written by surviving crew members as late as 1848 now while all these men were lost for years what many historians hoped to find was the ship itself it turns out that for a while the Inuit knew the location these are Canada's native people who hail from the Arctic and in their oral

history they have stories of how they would use the abandoned ship as a source of copper and iron however this apparently didn't last for long and just after a year the ship sank into the water and from then on it was unclear where the exact location was however in July of 2010 this all changed that's because it was during this month that Parks Canada sent a team of scientists and surveyors to look for their ship after breaking the ice on July 25th the crew decided to test their underwater scanner and in an incredible Stroke of

Luck the scanner happened to find a ship in the scanner's testing spot the ship was neither the arabus nor the terror rather it was the HMS investigator this was a ship that went to look for the Franklin expedition in 1853 however after getting stuck in the ice it subsequently sank to the bottom in any case thanks to the fortunate find on the first test run the entire investigation only took a few minutes and from there the crew were able to spend a good amount of time taking pictures of the wreckage and assessing it from then

on Parks Canada got emboldened in 2014 they man to find the HMS arabus and in 2016 they found the terror using the same technology just this year excavations began on HMS arabus and to date hundreds of artifacts have been Unearthed and an interesting side note it's also worth mentioning that this find strengthens Canada's historical and Geographic claim to the Northwest Passage this is because the finding of the ships exploring it as far back as the mid 1800s makes it clear that British and now by inheritance Canadian ships were in the area far before the American

Americans as such while America May periodically try to assert the Northwest Passage as being theirs due to the ownership of Alaska the reality is is that this is a weak argument at best and disingenuous at worst thanks for watching everyone I hope to see you next time thank you to our channel members