Episode 35 - Antarctica

Antarctica is one of the most remote and controlled places on Earth, and one of the most misunderstood.

In this episode of Arcane Station, we move from fiction to reality, and then into the theories that live in between. From the isolation and paranoia of The Thing, to real subglacial lakes like Lake Vostok, to persistent claims about ice walls, hidden lands, ancient maps, and unexplained phenomena, we break down what’s known, what’s claimed, and why Antarctica continues to generate more questions than answers.

This isn’t about proving what’s hidden beneath the ice. It’s about understanding why so many people believe something is.

Because in a place where access is limited, evidence disappears, and verification is nearly impossible… speculation doesn’t feel unreasonable.

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

But in Antarctica, the fiction is already strange enough.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hey everyone, welcome to Arcane Station. I'm your host, Mike Porter. Tonight we are going to talk about a location that is probably one of the most secretive and one of the most uh remote pieces of land you'll ever hear about, and that is, of course, Antarctica. And over the course of years, I've heard many weird tales about Antarctica, and so what I thought I'd do is just talk a little bit about what I've heard and talk about some of the conspiracies around Antarctica and how that remoteness kind of tends to allow for conspiracy to thrive and grow. Now I'm not saying the conspiracy is wrong because as everyone knows, uh conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact fact when things actually transpire. For instance, MKUltra, as I said uh in my AI podcast, um the government you know tries to cover cover up and obfuscate facts by calling it conspiracy when in fact there is things that are happening that people have a hint of, um, and then sort of game it out in their heads to a logical conclusion. But for years it's called conspiracy theory until the documents are released and you find out that it is, in fact, a fact about that uh evidence, right? So here we are talking about Antarctica. Now the first thing I want to do is just talk a little bit about pop culture in that respect. Um Antarctica makes a really good location for um mystery and intrigue and uh sci-fi actually. And one of the one of the absolute best films uh from that area, and what I love is John Carpenter's The Thing, um, the the 1980s version. And what I love about that is the rawness of the environment, the isolation. There's no help coming. And it's so foreign, it's almost like another planet. It's so incredibly dangerous there in terms of um just environmental hazard, you know, during the winter time. Um and if you look at other movies that have used that same location, if you remember Transformers, Megatron was frozen beneath the Antarctic ice. He had, you know, crashed on Earth most likely when it was a tropical area inside of the Antarctic region, and then it became iced over, and he was captured under um, you know, a mile of ice at least, right? And once it was discovered, there was a government um program to extract, you know, Megatron, but also the um the Allspark, right? The cube that um powers these creatures, these transformers. And if you go back and look at um H. P. Lovecraft work, you'll find at the mountains of madness, there's an ancient civilization buried beneath the ice, and of course, you know, it um that's where Cthulhu mythos comes along, you know, this cosmic horror, this cosmic godlike creature that is um buried in the ice in the mountains uh in Antarctica. And then of course you have the X-Files. Antarctica was tied to a hidden biological and government secret program there. And so you see that these shows tended to use this area because it's remote, it's isolated, it's hidden, and it's unverifiable, right? Like you can't actually go there yourself and verify um a thing that's happened there, right? Because there's restrictions around who can actually go to Antarctica itself, and then there's restricted areas within Antarctica itself that other people cannot go. Um, even if you have access to the continent, you don't have access to visit all of it. And it's a real danger to do so. Like there's uh crevices or crevasses, however you want to say it, that are you know, could be a mile deep, and so and packed with snow over the top that would not support your weight, and therefore you could fall down. And there's been incidents where people have fallen into these um things and not been able to be pulled out. So, what's really true about Antarctica is that for the most part the ice sheet over Antarctica is over a mile thick, and um there are different systems in terms of weights and depths of the ice. So um the eastern side is more thick and um packed than the western side because the western side has some volcanic activity underneath the ice sheet, and so therefore, there's lots of variation in the depth and um I guess the strength of the ice. Um and it also has subglacial systems. So, for instance, there is a place in uh there's a place called Lake Vostok, and it's a water system under pressure and isolation, and it's a liquid under all of this ice, which is really weird to think about, and that's because it has this different thermal sort of shielding, I guess, and um that liquid water is protected, I guess, by the compressing and the heat created by that compression. And there's allegedly over 400 lakes beneath the ice, and active, you know, like liquid. And there's heat beneath the ice, so there's melt zones and there's uneven subsurface activity, and a lot of times um when when they're surveying using this thermal stuff, they get these pockets of heat that probably shouldn't be there, but because of the thermal uh compression and because of the volcanic activity, you have these variations in temperature. And there's also um dry valleys, they're ice-free regions that exist. Although they're extremely limited and localized, what's interesting is that they're actually empty of ice. So it's really um, and I don't know if that's a thermal reaction again, like the the ground heating up causing this uh area to not have any ice, but there are these sort of desert-like areas that don't contain any um you know ice sheets in that space. Now, there's lots of information coming out from uh Antarctica, though one of the things that people have have seen uh on the ground, but also through satellite imagery, is are these pyramids. They're called nanotacks, and it's possibility that some of these could be man-made structures. Now, science is saying obviously that these are natural formations based on uh erosion and the way that the ice causes these things to take place. However, there's some very interesting um highly structured looking mountains, if that's the case, and pyramidical in shape. Um there's also these walls and ridges which um feel almost structured as well. And some uh satellite imagery looks like there's actually previously structures there. There's like these really uh rectilinear shapes and shadows that come from uh you know when the sun's hitting it in a certain way, that the angle of that light looks like there's a rectangular space there on the ground. Now I haven't done a lot of like combing the entirety of Antarctica through the satellite imagery, but I have seen those pyramid type shapes before. Now, what's really interesting, um there's some map paradoxes that take place. Uh early maps show this sort of southern land masses that were part of Antarctica that are no longer being shown. And I think what took place is in these earlier maps when people were doing the surveying of the land, perhaps calving of um icebergs caused these, like maybe large-scale calving of icebergs, created these sort of southern land masses, or the thought that this was a th southern landmass, because you know the ice caps, the ice cap is uh shedding or breaking off chunks of ice all the time. And um therefore some of these pieces could be quite large and appear to be like a landmass. And so perhaps in early mapping processes, the uh maps had these paradoxical sort of additional land spaces that weren't necessarily there once people began uh surveying with more modern equipment or um going to visit the location. So it's a possibility that you know that was one of the things that took place. Now, there's um I'm I'm not a flat earth person, I'll say that. I I I am a conspiracy theorist, but I will not say that the earth is flat. What I will say is uh there's an there's a difference between flat earth like that's a disk that's just floating out in space. Um what many flat earthers believe, I think, and I could be wrong here, but I think many flat earth earthers think that we are just in a flat section of a much larger space, and we're being confined into a section of that much larger space, and it's flat in that respect, not necessarily flat. Um not necessarily like a map on a table. Uh and again, this is me just um sort of thinking through what they might be thinking, because one of the things that they talk about are many sort of uh flat earth type environments outside of our own, and it's separated by an ice wall, and they say that all these lands exist beyond that. So I you know I can see where people would look at these giant ice walls and go, hey, there's something beyond there, and I'm not allowed to go there, therefore there's something beyond that. Um, but I think really there's ice shelves, and again, these are large, sort of wall-like shapes that take place, and there's restricted access to those. So, you know, uh you see images of this, and then you're like, hey, that looks like a structure, or that looks like something that is containing something else, and I want to go check it out, but you can't because you don't have clearance, and you know, multiple nations are uh have a treaty about what can be done on Antarctica. Um, you know, it becomes difficult to uh verify whether or not something is beyond that ice wall. Another thing, another conspiracy, is that there are hidden civilizations beneath the ice. And because of Lake Vostok and things like that, there's subglacial environments that could be used as habitats. And there are real lakes and there's real geothermal heat that provides a livable space. And so that's the possibility that people could look at and go, hey, I think because of this, there could be an ancient civilization. And if you look at the world overall, there are areas of the world that used to be, like for instance, Utah. There's many structures there that show that it used to be under oceans, the the structure of the rocks of those spaces that used to be an ocean and then dried out. The Sahara used to be tropical, used to have trees and vegetation and all that stuff, and of course it dried out. And so our earth is constantly cycling through all of these different environmental um movements of heat and cool, you know, and there's been many ice ages. I don't think there's just been one. There's been many um rises in temperature and falls in temperature, and I think we're actually in a cool period uh right now. We are warming, but we're in a cool period right now, and again, it's part of this really long cycle. Um the earth, you know, when you when you look at how the environment is reacting to this stuff, quite possibly we are adding to the uh heating or cooling through our intervention. But what I will say is that the earth has really long movements of heat and cool, and time runs different for Earth than it does for humans. We're here for a microsecond compared to the earth's billions of years. And you know, when you think about how um something moves over time, like a tree. If you sat and watched a tree for a day, you won't see it grow. If you sat and watched a tree, you know, for thirty years, you'll see it grow. And it's sort of the same thing, uh, but a much larger scale with the earth. You could watch the ice ages come and go, you could watch, you know, the temperature rise and fall. And um so I think we do have some minor impact on stuff, but it's very minimal compared to the earth's just natural cycle going through all these heating and cooling processes. There are there are structures underneath the water in the ocean next to South America, I think Cuba, um, that look pyramidical in shape, and so that would tell me during an ice age, all of the water that's being sucked up into these ice caps um allowed for the coastlines to be much lower than they are currently, right? And so if we were going to go through another massive ice age, a lot of the water would be pulled up to the ice caps in freezing and would lower the overall um water uh level globally, right? And so these structures are that are 60, 80, 100 feet underwater would would have been um above that waterline. Okay. Now, there's other creature crypto cryptids out there. There's these um creatures called the ninjin, which is uh a Japanese creature, and it's said to be this large white humanoid type creature with no arms, and it has legs, and it just sort of swims in the water, and they're massive. So that's another conspiracy there. There's uh a conspiracy about this operation that took to took place um with Admiral Byrd in um Antarctica, and it was called Operation High Jump, and I'm just gonna do a really quick touch on it. But basically, they said that they encountered an unknown craft, and there was loss of life and loss of equipment by the Americans when they went down there. Now there's another one that took place that was when Buzz Aldrin went down to Antarctica, he tweeted out, we are all in danger, it is evil itself. But what is he talking about? So we don't really know, right? Um, and so that's what made me want to take a look a little bit more about how you know how Antarctica is being viewed, right? So I'm gonna go a little bit deeper on some of these things. Um let's talk about water where it shouldn't be. So in the 1950s and 1970s, they had these uh seismeters, seismeters, and they were doing these seismic charge um readings, and they found uh that they thought that there would be these pockets um underneath the eyes. And then in the 1990s they used radar to confirm what they thought they knew in the 70s, right, through these seismic uh machines. And that's really interesting how you know, like we think we know something, and then science will come in and confirm when the technology is available for that, right? So, again, there's 400 plus lakes underneath uh Antarctic. And Lake Vostok is the one that's been the most studied, and there's been uh core samples and things like that that have gone down there, and it's really deep underground, and so it's very difficult to get to. However, there's liquid water under kilometers of ice, and um there are you know, people think that there might be these other tunnels or cavities. Um, you know, when they first started doing these seismic readings, they were like, wonder if there is this civilization under there that had built these uh cavities and these tunnels to provide um space for their living. However, when they went and looked with the um with the radar, they found that these were actually pockets of water, and again, I think the the compression causes this sort of thermal uh pocket to allow the water to remain fluid in that space and probably melts off a bit from the ice pack above it. Um and like I said, there's these geoth geothermal volcanic systems beneath western Antarctica, and they have melt zones and ice thinning from below, and they have these uh thermal anomalies. Um and the data shows that these are uneven active subsurface sections where the heat is uh this variance is causing these pockets. One of the things I talked about before is these dry valleys, and McMurdo base is in one of these dry valleys, and that's a research station there uh where they took they take and um have this area where people can live uh during a certain portion of the year to study things like penguins or um environmental science and things like that. Umother thing that took place quite a while ago uh prior to some of the more current technology is uh Google Earth satellite data was showing these green valleys within Antarctica. And people were speculating that uh how could this coldest place on Earth somehow have vegetation? And what was found out is that there were um compression anomalies anomalies on the data that was causing this issue of creating these green valleys, these um pockets of vegetation, and I'm using error quotes while I'm talking to you. Basically, um they thought that there was these pockets of vegetation, which found out later on. And again, we're having to completely rely and trust in the fact that Google is giving us uh the latest, most greatest, updated data. And the reason why I say that is uh just like in uh NASA imagery, everything is touched. Um they'll do false color imagery to make it more interesting, they will airbrush stuff out if they don't want to if uh and this is this has happened multiple times, so I'm not just being a conspiracy theorist about this. They are actually actively adjusting imagery uh rather than showing us the raw information all the time. So the same thing could be happening with Google and and you know, blind faith in anything is just silly. So it's it's great to be I for me, it's great to be skeptical about these things. Now, there's there's some other really inform uh really interesting information about Antarctica, and the reason why um many people were interested in it is from a very early time um there were active um attempts to live or to create a base on Antarctica, and one of those was by the Nazis. So during World War II, between 1938 and 1939, they had an Arctic expedition there, and um the region that they were looking at was called New Schwabenland, and what they wanted to do was they wanted to create a new um homeland for the Aryan race, allegedly Aryan race, because not one. But um the basically what they had is they they had German aerial photography and they had reports of ice free areas and again that's um you know where McMurdo is. Another thing that happened is is that during uh the end of the war they were trying to um capture as many German scientists um as they could but what was what was interesting is that some of the scientists were missing uh that should have been there and that that could be a possibility that the Russians also took some of the German German scientists but what people were speculating is that these German scientists were actually at New Schwabenland and my thought is is that if there is a space there then they have an underground or underwater um submarine base and an underground base because they have those thermal um vents and things like that to actually warm a space. So it's a possibility that there could have been a space there. Now the expedition the expedition is very real they wanted to establish uh Queen Maudland or New Schwabenland as a new space for Germans um but there's no evidence of permanent base construction but this myth grew you know mainly after World War II through speculative literature. I even have a game idea that I wrote up many years ago about um basically um this German this new Swabenland area they built a secret base and they were in um contact with uh aliens and that's why you have the the interesting UFOs um ufo um and I'm trying to remember the name of the actual UFO um Hannibal this the um technical drawings of UFO Nazi UFOs called Hannibal and Hannibal too and up to four or five I think these massive saucer shaped UFOs that the Germans were either building or intended to build and so in the game idea uh the Germans were interfacing with aliens because the aliens obviously are living under the Antarctic ice so that was the whole concept of the game and I thought that would have been a really interesting um space to make a uh a first person shooter is under the uh glacial ice and a Nazi uh submarine base so and like I said Operation High Jump the US Navy fought UFOs during Operation High Jump and that's the claim and the expedition was forced to retreat so and this this came about in UFO books and documentaries in the 1960s and the evidence claimed is that Admiral Byrd quotes about threats from polar regions and early termination of the mission. So Operation High Jump was real and aircraft accidents and weather problems were documented but there's no contemporaneous records mentioning UFO combat but he did say that there were um threats beyond our current technology is what he actually said. And so um that's where it kind of becomes this interesting concept that there could be this UFO base or this underwater UFO UAP base that could be interacting during World War II when we had a large scale operation that was going on at the time. So there's another thing that's really interesting so there's this claim that there's this ancient map that shows the regions of Antarctica ice free which no person um should have been able to see because at the time of most um sailboat technology the Antarctic ice was already there but this uh map not only shows that Antarctica is ice free it also has proof of advanced civilization on this map and then this is the interpretation of the Piri Reese map P-I-R-I-R-E-I-S and that was discovered or that was said to have been uh drawn up in 1513 and had these coastlines were interpreted as Antarctica and when you kind of map it up and look at it it sort of does look like the same structure of um Antarctica but what most people now believe is that this map shows South America and that the ancient civilization that was advanced would have been Olmec, Aztec Inga depending on when that happened and I think Olmecs are the oldest with the um technology of pyramid building pardon me. So Antarctica's interpret uh interpretation is debated still because they don't know if this is actually Antarctica or if it's uh South America but if you think about uh you know continental drift and things like that the um concept of Pangea um where islands uh the the continents drifted apart from one another the possibility that the outline of South America kind of matches with the outline of Antarctica could be feasible. I don't know if that was part of the actual drift that happened or where those lines of um volcanic activity that pushes those tectonic plates apart. I don't know if that's in that area but uh the way I look at it is if it's not Antarctica then it's a um sort of mirror's edge of what Antarctica's coastline is because of that tectonic movement. Um Antarctica like I said before is heavily restricted because people think that there's something uh important there and Antarctica has a treaty with restrictions on free movement through the space and the travel's extremely limited and research permits are required uh you can't just go visit you have to have a permit and this mainly may be due to environmental protection and safety but there could be things um and again the interior of Antarctica could be filled with really dangerous uh you know gaps in the space that would like swallow up uh dog sled teams or um snow cats or any sort of travel through there you could fall through in uh a chasm uh you could you know have this um even on the interior it that looks safe you could fall through the ice so uh you could be stuck in uh a blizzard uh the weather there is extremely uh unpredictable it could um you know even in spring or fall I'm sorry spring or summer there could be um really anomalous weather that could trap you or cause you to freeze to death so um around that area um in New Zealand we were really close to Antarctica in the South Island uh they called it the Roaring 40s the 40th latitude um the winds are really um aggressive um I saw I saw in um Wellington which is very windy uh when we were flying into Wellington uh many times we came in sideways on the airplane and I've seen uh a grown person having to crawl against the wind to get where they were going on the sidewalk because the wind was so strong it was pushing them backwards. And I've even been there um I was standing outside of the Weta workshop with a friend uh who worked there and we were talking about um the the trolls that are outside the Weta workshop caves and it felt like somebody actually pushed me in my back and that wind almost knocked me off my feet and he goes oh I guess we better go inside it was just the wind but it felt like a physical push from someone so the winds down there are massive and so I would imagine uh even when it's sort of a warm day if that wind picks up all that cool air above the ice that could really drop the temperatures rapidly so I understand why there's this thought that you know this place is restricted um for safety I understand that but at the same time that that gap of uh being able to actually go and visit yourself creates a lot of the conspiracy that we have right and a lot of the doubt about the reality of what's going on down there so here's my thought process I think I think um Antarctica does have some strangeness there I do think there is um I do think that it's a real place with extreme temperatures and it's difficult to access and that difficulty creates these um thoughts that things are being hidden from you. And the environment because of you know the snow and the blizzards and the wind and all that stuff it removes any evidence you'll see that there used to be or there is sometimes whaling stations there but they've been blown over and within a few years are almost gone. So that creates another limited means of observation because most of it's just white and covered with snow or ice and in just the season some of the things that have been structurally built there could be gone. There is real secrecy there is real restricted access there is real controlled movement and there's um real mediated information that is given out of Antarctica and not given out freely. So if there's a mediation between what happens and what you're told but that doesn't confirm the theories but it does explain why that theory or the series of theories about Antarctica exists. So here's what I think sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction but in Arctic but in Antarctica right now the fiction of that place is already strange enough. Okay that's all I have time for today I hope you've enjoyed this episode it's not the typical one with cryptids and all that stuff uh except for the ninja and I will continue to do more cryptid stuff if you like where I'm going with this podcast please let me know I would be really grateful. I have uh a Patreon you can find me at ArcaneStation Podcast um you can capture this podcast obviously um on most podcatchers I have a Facebook chat page ArcaneStation I have a uh YouTube channel ArcaneStation and I have an Instagram follow me on all of those things interact with me let's have a conversation you have an amazing night