It was January 2024 when a 3.6 million dollar underwater drone named Ran dove beneath the Dotson Ice Shelf near the so-called Doomsday glacier and never surfaced.
But before it disappeared, Ran had already beamed home images its lead scientist called a bit like seeing the back of the moon.
They showed teardrop hollows hundreds of feet long carved into the ice while the continent around it hid a blood red waterfall spilling from an ancient lake.
And wildest of all, a rainforest that grew 90 million years ago.
So, what did Ran actually find under there before it went quiet? I’m Ambrose Weld and here’s the part that makes this story stranger.
The same year Ran disappeared, the most famous myth about Antarctica fell apart on camera in front of the very people who believed it most.
We’ll get back to that submarine because what it saw matters more than anything people claim is hiding behind the ice wall.
But the wall comes first.
The man who flew to Antarctica to prove the sun was lying ended up proving himself wrong.
In December 2024, a Colorado pastor named Will Duffy took a small group south on a trip he called the final experiment.
Half of them were flat-earthers, the other half believed in the globe.
The trip cost each of them $31,495 and the test was simple.
On a flat-earth map, the sun can’t stay up for 24 hours over the far south.
On a globe in the southern summer, it should circle the sky and never set.
One of the travelers was Jeran Campanella, a flat-earth YouTuber with a big following.
He went down expecting to film the sun dropping below the horizon.
It never did.
On a live stream on December 14th, he told his audience he’d been almost sure there wasn’t a 24-hour sun in Antarctica, that he sincerely believed it.
And then he said, “Sometimes you’re wrong”.
Say what you like about him, that took some nerve.
A man who built a following on one idea, flew to the bottom of the planet and told that following live that the idea didn’t survive the trip.
That clip spread fast and it knocked the air out of the biggest legend about the continent, the ice wall.
The way the story goes, Antarctica is a towering ring of ice around the rim of a flat world, guarded so that nobody can walk past it and see what’s on the other side.
And the funny thing is, there really is a wall.
In January 1841, the British explorer James Clark Ross sailed south and ran straight into a cliff of ice that stopped his ship’s cold.
He wrote that it left no doubt in his mind about what came next and what came next was turning around.
For decades after that, sailors simply called it the barrier, sometimes the great ice barrier.
That’s your ice wall.
Today, we call it the front of the Ross Ice Shelf.
An ice shelf is a slab of glacier ice that has slid off the land and kept going out over the sea, floating.
Shelves like this fringe about 3/4 of Antarctica’s coastline.
The Ross Ice Shelf by itself covers an area close to France, about 500,000 square kilometers, and its front runs for more than 600 kilometers.
The cliff you see from a ship stands somewhere between 15 and 50 meters above the water, up to about 160 feet, and the ice carries on for hundreds of meters below the waterline.
From the deck of the ship, it really does look like the end of the world and that picture is exactly what the myth runs on.
Then there are the blurry patches.
People zoom into Antarctica on Google Earth, find smeared low-detail tiles, and ask what’s being hidden.
The answer is boring.
Imaging satellites run on fixed orbits and the sharpest pictures get spent on places where people live, build, and buy things.
A frozen continent with no cities gets fewer good passes, so the map fills the gaps with whatever it has.
There just aren’t many customers for high-resolution penguins.
The treaty sounds suspicious, too, right up until you read it.
The Antarctic Treaty was signed in Washington on December 1st, 1959 by 12 countries, and two of them were the United States and the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War.
It covers everything south of 60° south.
It bans military activity, nuclear testing, and any new territorial claims, and a later agreement, the Madrid Protocol, signed in 1991, shut the door on mining.
It came into force on June 23rd, 1961, and today 58 countries are part of it, 29 of them with a vote.
Two superpowers that agreed on almost nothing agreed to keep an entire continent out of their fight.
For 1959, that’s close to a miracle.
And the so-called forbidden zone gets a lot of visitors.
In the 2023 to 2024 season, more than 122,000 people traveled to Antarctica as tourists, according to the tour operator’s own association, IAATO.
Close to 79,000 of them actually stepped ashore, and 938 went deep into the interior.
So much for off-limits.
So, where did all the secrecy talk start? A lot of it leads back to one expedition.
In August 1946, the United States Navy launched Operation High Jump, and it was enormous.
About 4,700 people, 13 ships, and 33 aircraft, with the polar explorer Richard Byrd in charge.
Ever since, rumors have claimed it was really a hunt for a hidden Nazi base, or a battle with something that wasn’t human.
The record tells a plainer story.
The Navy wanted to test how men and machines held up in polar cold, set up a base called Little America 5 on the Ross Ice Shelf, and photograph as much of the coast as it could from the air.
And one of its goals was to strengthen a possible American claim over as much of Antarctica as possible, something officials denied in public before the expedition was over.
Highjump had real losses.
On December 30th, 1946, a seaplane called George 1 crashed in a blizzard, and three men died.
The six survivors were rescued 13 days later.
By the end of February 1947, the whole operation was pulled out because winter was coming early.
So, the hidden agenda turns out to have been a land claim, and about a dozen years later, the treaty closed that door for everybody.
Strip the myths away, and Antarctica is still hiding things, just not the ones people argue about online.
Under the ice, there are forests, lakes, and whole landscapes that haven’t seen daylight in millions of years.
And the machine that got the closest look at that ice from below was Ran.
Ran was named after the sea goddess of Norse myth, and it belonged to the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
It was a Hugin, a torpedo-shaped robot about 7 m long, built by the Norwegian company Kongsberg, and it could drive itself under the ice for hours with nobody steering.
At the time, only Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Australia had a craft like it.
Ran already had a reputation.
In early 2019, it became the first vehicle in the world to go under Thwaites Glacier, the one people call the Doomsday Glacier.
Thwaites is about the size of Florida.
It already accounts for about 4% of the rise in global sea level, and it loses around 50 billion tons of ice every year.
If it collapsed completely, it could raise the oceans by about 65 cm, just over 2 ft.
On that first trip, Ran measured the currents, the temperature, and the chemistry of the water under the glacier, and it brought back a water sample so researchers could look for the DNA of animals living down there.
Then in 2022, the team took Ran to the Dotson Ice Shelf, a little further west along the same coast.
Over 27 days, it traveled more than 1,000 km back and forth under the ice and reached 17 km into the cavity beneath the shelf.
Picture that.
A space full of black seawater, ice overhead the whole way, no daylight, and no one at the controls, and a robot feeling its way along about 50 m below the ceiling, scanning it with sonar as it went.
What came back were the first detailed maps ever made of the underside of an ice shelf.
Anna Wåhlin, the oceanographer at Gothenburg who led the work, was the one who said it was a bit like seeing the back of the moon.
She also said something that’s easy to skip past.
There are not many uncharted areas left on Earth.
This was one of them, and it was sitting right underneath a floating slab of ice.
Everybody expected a fairly smooth ceiling.
It wasn’t smooth at all.
The base of the ice had peaks and valleys, flat plateaus, terraces stacked like steps, and shapes that looked like sand dunes, only upside down and made of ice.
In the fastest flowing water on the western side, the sonar picked up teardrop-shaped hollows scooped up into the ice.
On average, they were about 68 m wide, some as narrow as 20 m, and some as wide as 170, and the biggest ran something like 300 m long.
That’s about three football fields carved into the bottom of a glacier by moving water.
And the shapes weren’t the only surprise.
For the first time, the team measured the currents running under the shelf, and they found the ice was melting fastest where strong currents scraped along its base, and very fast along cracks that run straight up through the glacier.
The researchers think the dune shapes were formed by water flowing under the influence of the Earth’s rotation.
In plain words, the spin of the planet steers the water, and the water carves the ice.
Wahlen set it straight.
Better models are needed to predict how these shelves will melt in the future.
The paper came out in Science Advances in the summer of 2024 under a title that sounds more like a dessert menu than a glacier study.
Swirls and scoops.
But by the time the world saw those maps, Ran was already gone.
In January 2024, the team went back to Dotson to repeat the surveys and see how much the ice had changed in 2 years.
Ran managed one repeat dive.
Then it went under again on a mission that had it working alone for more than 24 hours with no contact, and it never showed up at the pickup point.
The team tried to reach it and got nothing back.
Searchers found no signal and no debris.
Wahlen has described the strain of it, watching Ran disappear into the dark, unknown depths below the ice, and then waiting.
The best guesses are a mechanical failure or a collision with one of the ice ridges it had been mapping, but nobody knows.
Wahlen put it in a way that’s hard to argue with.
The team had more than 40 missions under the ice behind them, and that experience gave them confidence.
But in the end, she said, “The challenging environment beat us”.
Ran is believed to still be down there, somewhere deep under the shelf.
The team said it hoped to replace Ran and carry on.
And in October 2025, a successor, Ran 2, was announced, meant to go back and finish what the first one started.
Now, pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything else in this story.
The ice Ran was mapping is the floating part of Antarctica, the same kind of ice that makes up the so-called wall, and from underneath it was being carved away by warm water in ways nobody had seen before.
Keep that teardrop picture in your head.
It comes back at the end, and it matters more than any wall.
And the seabed off that same coast was keeping a record of time.
In 2017, the German research icebreaker Polarstern was working in the Amundsen Sea near the Pine Island Glacier, not far from where Ran would later disappear.
The team lowered a seafloor drill rig called MeBo 70, and pulled up a long core of sediment from under the seabed.
One layer stood out.
Johan Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, said its unusual color quickly caught their attention.
That layer was forest soil.
A dense network of fossil roots ran all the way through it, along with pollen, spores, and bits of flowering plants, preserved so well the researchers could make out individual cell structures.
It was about 90 million years old, from the middle of the Cretaceous, back when dinosaurs were still around.
Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University, read the pollen and spores and said the plants pointed to a dense temperate swampy forest, similar to the forests found in New Zealand today.
The climate numbers back that up.
The average yearly air temperature was about 12°C, roughly what Hobart in Tasmania gets now.
Summers averaged around 19°, and the rivers and swamps got up to 20.
Rain fell about as much and as hard as it does in Wales.
That’s a rainforest about 500 miles from the South Pole, which raises an obvious problem.
That forest sat through a polar night that lasted about 4 months every year.
A third of the year with no sun at all, and it still grew.
So, how? The answer is carbon dioxide.
When the climate modeler Gerrit Lohmann and the team tried to recreate that warmth in their models, it took between 1,120 and 1,680 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air to get Antarctica that warm.
That’s three to four times what we have today.
Sea levels back then were about 170 m higher than they are now.
Then, in November 2024, the same group announced something nobody had ever found on the continent before.
Amber.
Tiny pieces of fossilized tree resin picked out of that same 2017 core, which had come up from 946 m of water in Pine Island Bay.
Amber had turned up on every other continent, but never on this one.
The pieces are small, picked out of fragments about a millimeter across.
Henni Gerschau from TU Bergakademie Freiberg said the amber likely contains remains of the original tree bark.
And there’s a darker clue inside.
The resin shows signs of what scientists call pathological resin flow, the way a tree pours out sap when it’s been hurt by parasites or by wildfire.
So, something was attacking the trees in that forest near the South Pole, and it may have been fire.
I mean, think about that for a second.
A forest at the bottom of the world, possibly burning 90 million years before anyone would set foot there.
And on the other side of the continent, there’s a whole lost landscape.
In October 2023, a team led by Stewart Jamieson at Durham University and Neil Ross at Newcastle University published a map of ground buried under the ice of Wilkes Land in East Antarctica.
They found it by putting satellite views of the ice surface together with radar data collected by a plane flying over the site.
Under 1.
4 to 1.
9 mi of ice, there’s a landscape of valleys and ridges shaped by rivers covering roughly the area of Belgium or the state of Maryland.
The researchers think it has sat there, more or less untouched, for about 34 million years.
Jamison called it a snapshot of the past.
Most glaciers grind the ground beneath them down.
This ice barely moved, so the old landscape survived underneath it.
Put those finds side by side, and Antarctica stops looking like a frozen fortress.
It starts looking like a place that has completely changed before.
And the main thing that changed it was how warm the air was.
That’s why the shapes Ran found under Dotson matter so much, and we’ll get there.
But this next one is strange enough that it ended up in a study about Mars.
At the end of the Taylor Glacier, a stream of red pours out of the ice and runs down into Lake Bonney.
Seen from afar, the glacier seems to be bleeding, and the waterfall stands about five stories tall.
A British geologist named Thomas Griffith Taylor found it in 1911 during the Terra Nova expedition, and for more than a century, nobody could fully explain the color.
Here’s the odd part.
The water comes out clear.
It turns red only after it hits the air.
It comes from a pocket of salty brine trapped beneath the glacier, sealed under roughly 400 m of ice, and cut off for something like 1.
5 million years.
The brine is about twice as salty as seawater, and that salt is why keeps flowing when the air around it is well below freezing.
In 2023, Ken Livi, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins, looked at the water under a transmission electron microscope and found what earlier studies had missed.
Tiny spheres, rich in iron, each about a hundredth the size of a human red blood cell, with silicon, calcium, aluminum, and sodium mixed in.
When that iron meets the oxygen in the air, it rusts, and the waterfall turns red.
Earlier work had walked right past them for one simple reason.
As Livy put it, these nanospheres aren’t crystalline, and the methods built to find minerals look for crystals.
That’s the Mars connection.
Bloodfalls have been studied as a stand-in for a possible landing site on Mars, tested with the same kind of methods a rover would use.
Livy’s conclusion was awkward for anyone planning a mission.
A rover would have missed the cause because you’d need a transmission electron microscope to see these spheres, and sending one of those to Mars isn’t currently possible.
Then there’s what lives in it.
Jill Mikucki’s team had already found living microbes in the brine beneath the Taylor Glacier in total darkness, with no sunlight and no contact with the world above.
Livy says they may have been down there for potentially millions of years, and Bloodfalls is just the lake you can see.
In September of 2025, a team led by Sally Wilson, a doctoral researcher at the University of Leeds, went through 10 years of data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat satellite from 2010 to 2020.
CryoSat measures tiny changes in the height of the ice surface.
When a lake under the ice fills up, the surface above it bulges a little.
When it drains, the surface sinks.
Using that, they found 85 active lakes nobody knew about, bringing the total to 231.
They also caught 12 of them completing a full cycle of filling and draining.
Before this study, only 36 complete cycles had ever been recorded anywhere in the world.
Now there are 48.
That matters for a very practical reason.
Water under an ice sheet works like grease.
It cuts the friction between the ice and the rock, and the ice can slide toward the ocean faster.
Wilson said subglacial hydrology is a missing piece in many ice sheet models, and those models are what sea level forecasts are built on.
The biggest hidden lake of all is a different kind of place.
Lake Vostok sits roughly 4,000 m under the surface of the ice in East Antarctica.
It covers about 12,500 sq km and holds around 5,400 cubic kilometers of water.
Its water may have been sealed in for 15 million years or more.
Back in the late 1800s, the Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin suggested that the pressure of the ice could keep water liquid underneath it.
He was right.
The lake’s discovery was published in Nature in 1996, and on February 5th, 2012, Russian scientists finished a borehole 3,768 m deep and broke through to its surface.
Scientists expect the water to be packed with dissolved nitrogen and oxygen, around 50 times more than an ordinary lake, forced in by the weight of the ice pressing down at around 345 bars.
Nobody knows yet what, if anything, can live in water like that.
Forests that once grew here, river valleys buried for 34 million years, lakes that fill and drain like lungs.
Every one of these finds shows a continent that has changed before and ice that keeps moving.
That brings us to what the satellites and the drones are watching right now.
February 6th, 2020.
At Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the thermometer reached 18.
3°C, 64.
9°F.
That was the hottest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, about the same as Los Angeles that day.
The warm spell ran from February 5th to February 13th.
On nearby Eagle Island, about 106 mm of snowpack melted between February 6th and February 11th, around 4 in, and roughly 20% of the season’s snow was gone in that one event.
NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite caught it in two images on February 4th and February 13th.
And by the second one, about 1.
5 square kilometers of the island’s snow was soaked with meltwater.
The glaciologist Mauri Pelto looked at those pictures and said he’d never seen melt ponds form that far south on this continent.
“Melt like that,” he said, “is something you expect in Alaska and Greenland, not usually down here”.
Then he added the part people tend to skip.
One event like that on its own isn’t that significant.
What’s more significant is that these events are coming more frequently.
So, who is actually flying over all this ice? Mostly scientists.
In the field season that ran from January to March 2024, the British Antarctic Survey began testing the Windracers Ultra, a twin-engine pilotless plane about 10 m in size that can carry up to 100 kg of cargo or instruments and fly up to 1,000 km.
It can keep flying if one engine fails.
The plan is to use it to survey protected areas, check on krill with cameras, read the rock under the ice with magnetic and gravity sensors, and look inside glaciers with airborne radar.
Dominic Hodgson, the survey’s interim science director, said they were changing their approach to science by increasing the use of autonomous platforms.
And if you were hoping to fly your own drone over the ice wall, that’s off the table.
IAATO already banned recreational drone flying in Antarctica’s coastal areas, and in 2019, it restricted commercial flights there, too.
So, a pilot needs the tour operator’s approval to fly at all.
Lisa Kelly from IAATO said there were many questions still to be answered about drones potential impact on the environment and that the cold makes battery life hard to predict.
So the next time a dramatic clip of a drone sailing over the Antarctic ice shows up in your feed, it’s fair to ask who flew it and whether it’s real.
What the legitimate flights and satellites are recording is the part that should worry people.
On or around March 15th, 2022, the Conger Ice Shelf in East Antarctica fell apart completely.
It covered about 1,200 square kilometers, roughly the size of Rome.
It had been shrinking since at least 2020.
Then an atmospheric river parked warm air over the continent and the shelf collapsed within days.
Concordia Station, high on the East Antarctic Plateau, hit -11.
8° C on March 18th, more than 40° above normal for that time of year.
It was the first ice shelf collapse of its kind anyone had ever watched happen in East Antarctica, the side of the continent people had long treated as the stable one.
Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution called it one of the most significant collapse events anywhere in Antarctica since the early 2000s and most likely a sign of what might be coming.
And it may not stay rare.
In September 2025, new research put a number on it, warning that about 60% of Antarctica’s ice shelves could become unsustainable by 2085, decades ahead of earlier estimates.
Here’s the part almost everybody gets backwards.
An ice shelf is already floating, so when one breaks up, the sea barely rises from the shelf itself.
The danger is what the shelf was doing.
A shelf works like a brake on the glaciers flowing off the land behind it.
Take the brake away and those glaciers can speed up and pour more ice into the ocean than the snow puts back.
We’ve seen it happen.
In early 2002, the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula broke apart in 3 weeks or less.
About 3,250 square kilometers of ice, 220 meters thick, gone after meltwater ponds on its surface drained into cracks and pried it open.
At Thwaites, the floating eastern ice shelf holds back about a third of the glacier.
Losing it could push Thwaites’ contribution to sea level rise up by as much as 25%.
Thwaites on its own could raise the oceans about 65 centimeters.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet behind it holds enough ice for about 3.
3 meters, almost 11 feet, and most of that ice rests on ground that sits below sea level.
So, go back to Ran, alone in the dark under the Dotson Ice Shelf.
The images it sent home showed the underside of that break, the part nobody can see from a ship or a drone, and it was being carved into teardrops by warm water steered by the spin of the planet, melting fastest along the cracks.
That’s what the ice wall looks like from below.
The wall people have argued about for years is real, and the most shocking footage ever taken of it doesn’t show the edge of the world.
It shows the wall being eaten away from underneath in a place no camera on the surface will ever see.
Ran never came back to tell the rest.
It’s successor is supposed to go back to that same dark cavity and measure how much more of the ceiling is gone.
I’m Ambrose Bierce, and if you want more videos like this one about what’s really hidden at the ends of the earth and the machines that go looking for it, stay with the channel because Antarctica still has a lot it hasn’t shown us yet.
