In addition to the dangers, the Arctic and Antarctic ice are fraught with many mysteries that many researchers dream of solving.
The virus is hundreds of times more dangerous than AIDS
In 2014, Russian scientists discovered a new, previously unknown virus in the thawing permafrost of Kolyma. He slept in the ice for 30 thousand years and turned out to be the most alive of all the living. As soon as it thawed out, it immediately began to attack the amoebae and actively multiply inside these unicellular ones. Scientists have nicknamed it pitovirus.
The peculiarity of this “sleeping beauty” is the fact that its structure is very complex: the virus contains 500 genes, while the HIV virus contains only 12 genes. The second feature is its gigantic size. Fortunately, the virus is not yet dangerous to humans, but there is still a risk of mutations.
Nazi base in the Arctic
In 2016, Russian researchers on the island of Alexandra Land found the Nazi base Schatzbraber — “Treasure Hunter”. This base was built and equipped in 1942 and abandoned two years later after the Nazis tasted the meat of a polar bear infected with trichinosis. Due to the cold, the base was kept in good condition.
More than five hundred historical artifacts, including documents, were found on it. Because of the name of the base, it was widely believed that the Germans were looking for ancient Hyperborean artifacts, although most likely everything was more prosaic: they monitored the weather and could observe the movement of Soviet and Allied ships.
The Polar Madonna
In 2015, Russian scientists discovered ancient graves of an unknown people near Salekhard. First, the remains of 11 men and children were found, and in 2017, a woman named the Polar Princess was found. Her remains were preserved thanks to copper objects placed by her tribesmen in the grave.
A copper cauldron was found in the burial, as well as dishes typical of Persia, which is strange. Russian scientists, together with their Korean colleagues, found out that the woman was 35 years old, she retained all her teeth and thick hair, and the Princess died, most likely due to a difficult birth: the baby’s body was resting with her mother.
Sounds from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean
In 2016, near the Igloolik Eskimo settlement in Nunavut, Canadian scientists recorded strange sounds coming from the bottom of the Fury and Hekla Strait. This hum occurs for unknown reasons, it sounds for quite a long time and scares away the entire animal world.
The situation of Canadian fishermen is complicated by the fact that the Strait is one of the most fishing spots on the coast. If the fish leave there, the fishermen are left without earnings. At the same time, it is very interesting that the Canadian military, not scientists, is engaged in the study of sounds.
Photos that are 100 years old
In 2013, New Zealand researchers found undeveloped films from a century ago at an old Antarctic base. They were snapped off by Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton during an expedition to the Ross Sea in 1915. His expedition planned to hike around the Antarctic.
They made an attempt to organize food warehouses, but failed when one of the groups literally lost the ship and got stuck on Ross Island. When the polar explorers were rescued, they had no time for photographs, which, of course, became an amazing testimony to the courage of the researchers of the XX century.
The discovery of a 150-year-old British ship
In the summer of 2016, researchers from the Russian Geographical Society found the remains of a sunken British steamer in the Yenisei River near Igarka in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. According to the official history, the steamship Thames sank in 1877. The vessel entered the Yenisei and penetrated 800 kilometers deep into the territory of the Russian Empire, “paving trade routes.”
The stranded steamer was frozen in ice and was damaged, and the crew was forced to leave by land, having sold all property from the steamer. The Russian schooner Northern Lights was found nearby at the bottom of the Yenisei. In the 19th century, she sailed from Krasnoyarsk to St. Petersburg with collections for the capital’s museums, but sank, and the entire crew died of scurvy.
The skeleton of a dragon
In 2019, Argentine scientists conducted complex excavations on the Antarctic island of Seymour, the purpose of which was to extract the remains of a huge 15-ton elasmosaur lizard. “A colossus among giants” is how paleontologists described him. Its length was 12 meters.
The lizard can be classified as a plesiosaur, but it had a shorter neck and a larger skull. Until now, scientists have not been able to find the remains of these lizards, whose weight did not exceed four tons. According to experts, this fact suggests that elasmosaurs flourished in Antarctica and had an extensive food supply.
Subglacial anomaly
For the first time, the existence of a gravity anomaly in Antarctica was noted back in 1958 by scientists from the USA and France. The anomaly was shaped like a circle with a diameter of about 240 kilometers. In 2016, the existence of the “Wilkes anomaly” was confirmed by NASA satellites launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome. But now its diameter, according to updated data, was already 480 kilometers.
The anomaly is located in the northern part of Wilkes Land. Scientists have only one assumption: most likely, the anomaly is a huge crater from the collision of the Earth with an asteroid, and part of this asteroid, which has a denser structure, has remained forever under kilometers of Antarctic ice.
By Alexander Lavrentiev
