Antarctica, Earth's most mysterious continent, is vastly larger and more geologically complex than commonly perceived, harboring hidden landscapes, potential life, and immense natural resources beneath its ice sheet, with its future governance and resource exploitation becoming a critical geopolitical issue.
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Antarctica is easily the least
understood and the most mysterious of
All Earth's continents in the 21st
century it's such a poorly understood
place that most people alive today still
don't even really have a solid grasp
about Antarctica's true size or shape
something that's probably not really
helped by our perception of Antarctica
as this sprawling misshapen blob that we
always see stretching across the bottom
of our two-dimensional Maps if it's even
displayed on the map at all in reality
Antarctica is the world's fifth largest
continent exceeding the sizes of austral
Australia and Europe and being closer in
size to South America than any other
continent the true scale of Antarctica
can be revealed when overlaying it at
top a continent that were more familiar
with like North America Antarctica is
significantly larger than the mainland
Continental 48 US states with the
distance from the Antarctic Peninsula to
the other side of the continent is as
far as the Canadian Arctic islands are
to Mexico and placed over Europe
Antarctica would stretch from the far
Northern reaches of Norway and Finland
down to Iran and Iraq in the Southeast
and well past Ireland into the
Mid-Atlantic to the West it's a
genuinely massive place and it's also
almost completely empty and absent from
human life the human population of
Antarctica ranges from as many as 4,000
people during the warmer Antarctic
summer months to as few as only a
thousand people during the long dark and
savagely cold Antarctic Winters when the
darkness of night envelops the entire
continent for months straight and the
temperatures plummet to beneath - 34° c
continent wide but it's not just the bru
brutal weather of Antarctica that keeps
its population low it's also just an
insanely remote place that's really
difficult to get yourself to it's
located down at the bottom of the globe
and the closest large human settlement
to the continent is usua in Far Southern
Argentina which is still about a th000
km away from the tip of the Antarctic
Peninsula despite this closeness however
the distance between usua and Antarctica
is separated by the infamous Drake
Passage an expanse of water that is
perhaps the roughest and most dangerous
part of the world's ocean
here at the bottom of the civilizational
world between the continents the
Southern and Pacific Oceans flow
unobstructed into the Atlantic
representing the only location in the
southern hemisphere where winds and
ocean currents can each flow around the
entire world without any obstruction
from Land allowing them to violently
whip around the world continually and
keep picking up speed and strength as
they go this combined with a collision
of warmer water in the north and colder
water in the South result in powerful
waves in the Drake Passage that can
climb up to nearly 20 M or 65 ft High
during extreme weather scenarios with
the rough conditions through the Drake
Passage and the vast distances between
Antarctica and the other nearby
continents of Africa and Australia it's
no wonder that human eyes most likely
never even saw the Frozen continent at
all until the 19th century when a
Russian ship made the first ever
recorded discovery of Antarctica in 1820
even today more than 2 centuries later
we still understand precious little
about this ice olated continent
especially anything about what's
possibly beneath the Titanic antarctic
ice sheet ice covers more than 98% of
the Antarctic continent's surface
leaving very few exposed areas of land
above the ice that we can actually
observe with our own eyes on average
across the entire continent the
Antarctic ice sheet stretches more than
2 km thick from the surface we can
observe down to the surface of the
actual Continental land mass but at its
thickest points the ice on Antarctica
can reach upwards of nearly 5 K
thick which is nearly as thick as six of
the bir khalifas in Dubai the world's
tallest building all stacked on top of
each other this is why 61% of all the
freshwat on the planet is locked away in
Antarctica's ice sheet and if the entire
thing melted away into its liquid form
it would probably end up raising Global
sea levels by around 60 M which would be
enormously catastrophic and result in
the total obliteration of Florida and
most of the US Gulf and East coasts the
ice sheet of Antarctica is so thick and
impenetrable that it's widely accepted
that we know more about the surface of
far away worlds like Mars today than
what's actually beneath the Antarctic
ice sheet on the real surface of
Antarctica rather than drilling through
kilometers of ice to see what's beneath
it the primary way that we've been able
to sort of visualize what's beneath the
ice on the continent is by flying planes
over it and shooting radio waves down
into the ice below and then analyzing
how the waves Echo back up to the plane
a process that's known as radio Echo
sounding but the Antarctic continent is
of course a much larger place than even
Europe is and so flying planes doing
this technique over the entire continent
would be a brutally painstaking
expensive and time-consuming process so
as it stands now we only have a limited
idea of what's beneath the Frozen
continent based on the few radio Echo
sounding flights we've actually done
across it so far and it's estimated that
more than 90% of the continent beneath
the ice remains unmapped and unknown but
the small small amount of information we
already do know about what's beneath the
world's largest ice sheet on the world's
most mysterious continent is already
incredibly fascinating for starters we
already know that Antarctica isn't
really a unified land mass beneath the
ice like it appears to us above the ice
were all of the continents ice sheet to
melt or be removed the Antarctic
continent's true shape would be revealed
to us what we currently know is the
Antarctic peninsula in reality would
emerge as a completely separate
archipelago of mountainous islands that
has sometimes been referred to as lesser
Antarctica While most of the rest of the
continent known as greater Antarctica
would remain above the ocean surface and
be roughly the same size as Australia
each of these two different halves of
Antarctica one archipelagic and one
Continental would become this way
because of their radically different
geologies and histories the area of
Greater Antarctica or the Eastern side
of the continent is known to consist of
more ancient ignas and metamorphic rocks
while the more archipelagic lesser
Antarctica is much younger and made up a
sedimentary and vol volcanic rocks
instead fascinatingly lesser Antarctica
belongs to the Great Pacific Ring of
Fire a continuous belt of tectonic fault
lines and active volcanoes that spans
nearly the entire perimeter of the
Pacific Ocean and which has existed for
about the past 35 million years as a
result most of the archipelagos and
islands that exist in lesser Antarctica
are volcanic in nature despite their
appearances of Frozen ice and Glaciers
on top of them Mount arabus far to the
east in Antarctica is the highest active
volcano on the continent and the
southernmost active volcano on the
planet complete with a lake of molten
lava within its inner summit crater that
has been observable since the 1970s and
the last erupted only a few years ago in
2020 the average yearr round temperature
around where Mount arabus is located
remains around -7° C and during the
Antarctic winter months between April
and September the temperature will never
climb above -20 C and it'll sink to as
low as - 62° c in August cold enough to
cause frostbite to expose Skin Within
minutes or to instantly freeze water if
you were to pour out a bowl of hot water
in the air at these temperatures it
would turn to snow before it even hit
the ground this is an environment that
is incredibly hostile to life where you
wouldn't expect to find very much of it
and yet just beneath the surface of
Mount arabus is an entire new world that
we've only just started to come to
understand decades and centuries worth
of hot steam produced by the mount
arabis volcano have carved out a network
of tunnels through the ice beneath the
mountain Within These subvolcanic Ice
Caves the temperatures are known to
reach as high as 25° C or about 77 F
warm enough for you or me to hang out
down there in a t-shirt and shorts and
be comfortable doing it despite being in
the middle of Antarctica and that means
that the antartic subvolcanic cave
systems could be warm enough to host all
kinds of life that we may not even be
aware of yet back in 2017 a team led by
the Australian National University
acquired a sample of the soil within one
of these cave systems beneath Mount
arabus and after analyzing its
composition they discovered that the
soil contain DNA traces of things like
algae and mosses but most tantalizing of
all DNA traces of small animals that
might be living down there as well in a
sub Antarctic Oasis Of Life most of
these animal rated DNA traces they found
were similar to species that we already
know of living up on the surface but not
all of them some of the traces couldn't
be linked to species we already know
about but were most closely related to
anthropods species like shrimp
centipedes or spiders meaning that there
could be anthropod like species down in
these warm caves beneath Mount arabus
that remain unknown to Mankind and
indeed there are 15 other active or
semi-active volcanoes located across
Antarctica that could contain similar
warm steam carved tunnels and caves
beneath them all as well meaning that
there could be more than a dozen of
these oasis-like ecosystems beneath the
ice of Antarctica that we presently know
virtually nothing about planes flying
over Antarctica with radio Echo sounding
data have revealed a vast landscape
beneath the ice of rolling valleys
riverbeds and Hills similar to the
landscape seen Elsewhere on Earth only
Frozen in time and locked beneath
colomet of ice one of the most
interesting geographic features on the
continent that was only recently
discovered in 2019 however is what we
now know as the deepest canyon anywhere
on the earth's land surface a canyon
that if it wasn't hidden by the ice
above it would put the Grand Canyon in
America to shame within greater
Antarctica beneath the Denman Glacier
exists the canyon that we Now understand
plummets to 3 and 1/2 km deep beneath
the sea level which is just insanely
deep for reference this Canyon in
Antarctica sinks to a depth that is
roughly the same as the average depth of
the Atlantic Ocean and it's roughly half
as deep as Mount Everest is tall the
deepest point below sea level on exposed
land on the planet is the shoreline
around the dead sea between Jordan
Israel and the West Bank and it only
sinks to as low as 413 m beneath sea
level this Canyon in Antarctica sinks
nearly 8 and 1/2 times deeper than that
only in the oceans do Canyons dip deeper
below the surface and we didn't even
know about this super deep Canyon on
Antarctica until 2019 because it's been
covered up by kilometers worth of ice
for millions of years now imagine what
looking out at this Canyon would be like
without without all of the ice obscuring
it but the deepest canyon on the earth
is far from the only interesting
geographic feature that the ice of the
Frozen continent has been hiding from us
in 1958 a team of Soviet researchers in
Antarctica discovered a massive mountain
range beneath the ice sheet that nobody
knew about beforehand that became known
as the gamertv mountain range named
after the Soviet geophysicist gregori
gamertv these mountains are roughly the
same length and height as the Alps in
southern Europe are running for about
1200 km long with Peaks soaring up to as
much as 2700 M High they're also
completely obscured from the surface
because they are buried beneath more
than 600 M of ice and snow pack and
they're still far from the only
interesting thing hidden beneath the ice
of the
continent in the late 1950s and early
60s researchers began detecting a large
gravity anomaly in East Antarctica where
the gravity present was weaker than what
would be naturally expected the anomaly
spanned across a huge area beneath
antarctic ice sheet that was about 243
km wide and sunk down to a depth of
about 848 M for decades there were
several hypotheses about what exactly
could be causing this weaker gravity in
the area of East Antarctica until in
2006 a team of researchers from Ohio
State University using data from
satellites owned by NASA and the German
Aerospace Center managed to identify
what they believed to be an ancient 480
km wide meteorite impact crater that was
buried beneath the ice sheet
but because of the area's extremely
remote location and distance beneath
several kilomet worth of solid ice
there's still to date have never been
any direct samples taken from the area
to actually test for this impact event
hypothesis and so the idea that an
asteroid could have impacted this area
and caused a massive crater in anarctica
is still only a theory for now but a
highly likely Theory
nonetheless If the gravity anomaly here
turns out to indeed be a meteorite
impact crater it would be by far the
largest one ever discovered in the world
with a width that's nearly three times
as large as the chick Club impact crater
in the yukatan peninsula of Mexico that
is believed to have been formed by a 10
km wide asteroid that struck the area
roughly 66 million years ago and likely
contributed to the annihilation of the
dinosaurs in order to create an impact
crater nearly three times larger than
that one in Antarctica the asteroid that
might have hit the area would have had
to have been four to five times larger
than the dinosaur killer asteroid was so
roughly 40 to 50 kilm wide an asteroid
that would have been big enough to
stretch from Central Park in New York
City all the way into Connecticut now
because of effects like erosion impact
craters on the Earth's surface gradually
disappear over time because of this
phenomenon the Ohio State University
researchers who concluded that the
structure hidden beneath the Antarctic
ice sheet was an impact crater believe
that it happened no more than 500
million years ago and no less than 100
million years ago because the structure
seems to also have been geographically
disturbed by the rift valley in the area
that only formed around a 100 million
years ago during the separation of
Antarctica and Australia from the
ancient gondwana superc continent and
that timeline between 100 and 500
million years ago is extremely
interesting because it potentially lines
up more or less with the greatest mass
extinction event that ever happened in
our planet's history the perian Triassic
Extinction event that took place
sometime around
21.9 million years ago an a
apocalyptically traumatizing event that
is also often referred to as the great
dying something happened on our planet
all that time ago that quickly
annihilated 57% of all biological
families that existed at the time
including a wipe out of 81% of the
Earth's marine species and 70% of the
Earth's land-based vertebrate species it
is by far the biggest mass extinction
event that ever took place on the planet
and we still don't have a precise
explanation of what exactly happened
that caused it but it could just be that
the deep and mysterious antarctic ice
sheet has been hiding the cause of the
Great dying from us this entire time if
indeed it turns out that the East
Antarctic gravity anomaly is truly the
biggest impact crater that we have ever
discovered and it's been even further
hypothesize that if it really was an
impact event that caused it it could
have been so massive and destructive
that it directly contributed to the
breakup of the gandana supercontinent by
severely weakening the crust at the
location of impact which eventually led
to the separation of that ancient
continent between Antarctica Australia and
and
India also hidden beneath the surface of
the vast Antarctica I sheet are around
675 liquid subglacial Lakes the
researchers have only started
discovering since the 1990s little more
than only three decades ago several of
these liquid Lakes have been discovered
Deeper Than 3 kilm beneath the surface
of the Antarctic ice sheet and by far
the largest of them discovered to date
is the infamously mysterious Lake VTO
which was only discovered by a team of
Russian researchers in the east of the
continent in the early 1990s and its
Discovery wasn't announced to the
general public until it was published in
the scientific journal Nature in
1996 it turns out the lake VTO is a
massive body of liquid water that exists
about 4 kilm deep beneath the surface of
the Antarctic ice sheet and by the
volume of water contained within the
lake lake VTO is surprisingly the sixth
largest known lake in the world
containing an amount of water within it
that is even greater than that of Lake
Michigan in the United States and we
didn't even know about it at all until
the same year that Tiger Woods made his
professional debut at the PGA Tour
interestingly the liquid water contained
within Lake VTO is below freezing
temperature maintaining an average of
about -3° C or about 27 F this is
possible because it's believed that
there's a geothermal vent beneath the
Lake's floor that's providing it with
some heat while the pressure from the 4
km of thick ice above the lake reduces
the Ice's melting point and provides the
Lakes water with insulation from the
abominably cold temperatures above it
and while -3° C temperature water is too
cold for most marine life we know of to
survive it's still warm enough for many
other species we know of that have
adapted to extremely cold environments
to thrive in Antarctic Krill ice fish
arctic cod and certain species of sea
stars sea urchins and mollusks that we
already know of are capable of surviving
in extremely cold Subzero Waters so what
mysterious life forms that we're
presently unaware of could be existing
Down Below in the depths of lake vosto
and the hundreds of other Lakes dotted
across Antarctica hidden beneath the ice
sheet Lake VTO is a particularly
interesting case because it's believed
to have been completely sealed off from
the rest of the outside world by the
Antarctic ice sheet for at least the
past 15 million years meaning that if
life exists within the lake it has
evolved in complete separation from
everywhere else in the world for
millions of years now in 2012 a team of
Russian researchers successfully carried
out the first ever drilling from the
surface of the Antarctic ice sheet all
the way down nearly 4 km deep to the
liquid surface of Lake VTO where samples
of the water were taken and carried back
to the surface however this initial
drilling sample taken from the lake by
the Russians has been widely criticized
for not being properly sanitized and as
a result the data they took is known to
be heavily contaminated subsequent
analysis of the Lakes water sample has
revealed kerosene contam ination and
outside bacteria contaminants that were
present on the drill bit before it even
reached the lake
255 previously known contaminant species
of bacteria have been identified by
researchers in the 2012 Russian Ice
sample since then but they have also
managed to identify at least one
bacteria species from the sample that is
presently unknown and has no matches in
any International databases which the
team hopes is evidence for at least one
unknown bacteria species that exists
down there the Russian team apparently
drilled another second bore hole down
from the surface into Lake VTO in 2015
that they claimed was cleaner and more
properly sanitized that resulted in
another 1 lit sample of Lake V's water
being acquired but the results on that
water to date have never been published
or reported on so it's unclear what if
anything they may have found in it most
researchers involved with Lake VTO
expect that if life actually does exist
down there it'll be limited to simple
life forms like bacteria which might not
really sound all that exciting or sexy
but it could carry with it signific ific
implications for other simple life forms
that might be existing Elsewhere on
other worlds in our own solar system
deep in the liquid oceans we also know
exist beneath kilometers of Frozen ice
on some of the moons of Jupiter and
Saturn like Europa and
Enceladus but there might also just be
the chance that there actually is more
complex life existing down there in Lake
vosto than we might expect in 2020 a
study conducted by researchers kby gura
and Scott Rogers of Lake vosto accretion
ice rather than the liquid water within
the lake itself revealed additional
unknown bacteria species and most
fascinatingly of all an rrna sequence
that was more than 97% similar to that
of a species of rock codfish that is
common along the Antarctic Coastline
representing the first scientific report
of an unknown fish species that could
possibly be existing down within Lake
VTO it would be incredible to one day
see a sea drone with a camera and L
attached to it get deployed down into
Lake vok to see more of what's actually
down there because based on a similar
event that happened just a few years ago
in 2021 the results could indeed be
wildly unexpected in the final days of
December in 2021 a team of scientists
from New Zealand melted a small hole
through a glacier in West Antarctica
here at the cam by stream the team knew
that a large Cavern of liquid water
existed about 500 M beneath the glacier
surface here carved out over time by a
small flowing river beneath the ice but
when the team actually lowered a camera
down into the hole they carved down into
the liquid waterfill Cavern below what
they saw shocked everybody involved they
actually saw animals hundreds of them
swimming around in the isolated Cavern
below the team later identified these
blurry orange blotches to be shrimp-like
Marine crustations called aods and here
in this cold isolated Cavern of water
500 M beneath the ice and a whopping 500
km away from the nearest sunlight locked
in complete darkness were hundreds of
these more complex life forms absolutely
thriving practically nobody expected to
find that much life down here and so
what implications does that 2021
Discovery have for what unknown life may
be existing within Lake VTO or within
any of the hundreds of other Lakes
locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet
that we haven't ever seen so far the
area of the West Antarctic ice sheet
spans across a vast area that is roughly
the same size as Mexico and yet to this
date Humanity has only managed to
actually witness a fraction of the
unknown world that exists beneath the
ice here a few dozen small B holes
dotted around the region that has
exposed a disjointed area to us only
about the size of a regulation
basketball court the world beyond that
basketball court in an area that's the
size of Mexico remains unobserved
unknown and mysterious and I deeply want
to know more about it and in addition to
all the unknown life and geographic
features that probably exists beneath
the Antarctic ice sheet there's also
almost certainly a vast amount of
undiscovered and completely untapped
natural resources beneath the ice sheet
that Humanity will likely begin to
deeply covet one day soon as well for
decades it has been theorized that
Antarctica is likely home to massive
deposits of energy resources like oil
and gas and coal owing to the fact that
for hundreds of millions of years in the
past the continent was not frozen and
existed in a warmer part of the world
that likely contained eons worth of
animal and plant life it was only around
35 million years ago that Antarctica
drifted far enough South to begin
acquiring its ice sheet and for hundreds
of millions of years before that it
never had any allowing plenty of time
for complex life to evolve and die and
gradually transform into hydrocarbons
like petroleum over the eons but it
wasn't until just a few months ago
before this video was published in May
of 2024 that we had any idea of the
actual potential extent of these
Antarctic oil and gas reserves early
that month evidence presented to the UK
parliament in London revealed that a
Russian research ship operating in the
wed sea region between the Antarctic
peninsula in the west and greater
Antarctica in the East discovered a
truly gargantuan oil field there
estimated to contain a deposit of approximately
approximately
511 billion barrels which is an
absolutely absurd amount of oil for
reference the oil contained within this
one Antarctic superfield is roughly
double the amount of oil reserves
controlled by Saudi Arabia or put
another way the oil in this Antarctic
super field is roughly 10 times the
amount of oil that the entire North Sea
has collectively produced over the past
50 years British members of parliament
cautioned in 2024 that the Russian
Discovery here could become a Prelude to
countries or companies hauling in their
offshore drilling platforms to exploit
the field and most alarmingly of all the
Discover was made directly in the
epicenter of the most widely disputed
part of the Frozen continent that is
simultaneously claimed by the United
Kingdom in Argentina and partially by
Chile as well but for now straight up
drilling for oil in the wetle sea here
is illegal under international law
because of something known as the
Antarctic treaty an international treaty
that has its origins in the mid 20th
century you see up until the late 1950s
Antarctica was theoretically a
free-for-all land open to exploitation
settlement and colonization from anyone
brave enough to try it it was simply the
continent's extremely remote location
and extremely hostile environment that
kept most people from Ever trying but
not everyone seven countries officially
staked out their own territorial claims
to Antarctic territory during the early
20th century including New Zealand
Australia France and Norway and the
sharply competing overlapping claims of
the United Kingdom Argentina and Chile
all of these countries territorial
claims in Antarctica were based on their
pre-existing legal claims or control of
territory nearby to Antarctica such as
New Zealand's and Australia's home
territories France is relatively nearby
cro and kulan islands and Norway's
bouvet Island similarly the UK's claimed
territory in Antarctica largely came out
of an extension of their claims to the
fauland islands along with South Georgia
and the South Sandwich Islands nearby
while Argentina's almost identical
overlapping claim to Antarctica was
based not only on their own territorial
Mainland but also on their identical
competing claims to the same Islands
claimed by Britain the fauland along
with South Georgia and the South
Sandwich Islands while Chile's
territorial claims were also based on
the proximity of their Mainland
territory the territorial disputes on
Antarctica itself between the UK
Argentina and Chile and between
Argentina and the UK over all of these
other Islands was heating up in the mid
20th century and risked escalating into
violence and So within the context of
the greater cold war that was going on
between the United States and the Soviet
Union at the time a group of 12
countries got together in 1959 and
signed the Antarctic treaty which
primarily sought to figuratively freeze
the antartic continent in a sort of
stasis just as it was and prevent the
use of the continent for any military
purposes while preserving it for
scientific research and access military
operations on Antarctica were agreed by
everyone to be severely restricted
nuclear tests and detonations as well as
dumping of nuclear waste on Antarctica
were all agreed to be banned and a
powerful independent monitoring system
was put into place that enabled any
country to inspect any other country's
facilities on the continent without
warning to make sure they were actually
abiding by all of the terms of the
treaty Antarctica as defined by the
treaty consists of all the land ice
islands and ocean below the 60 degrees
of latitude line the seven countries who
had already made territorial claims to
Antarctica before the treaty was signed
had their claims Frozen and they became
legally unenforceable the US and the
Soviet Union and later Russia reserved
themselves the right to stake out their
own territorial claims to Antarctica at
some undetermined point in the future
will any country from around the world
was eligible to join the treaty and
establish research bases on the
continent wherever they deemed fit
regardless of any other country's
territorial claims and perhaps most
importantly the treaty explicitly
forbids the harvesting of any of
Antarctica's potential resources or even
prospecting for the continent's
potential resources no mining or
drilling for resources on Antarctica
have been allowed ever since as a result
up to the present day in 2024 there are
dozens of active research stations and
bases dotted all across the Antarctic
continent that belong to no less than 55
different countries from all around the
world many of them being within the
zones of the continent's territory
that's theoretically claimed by other
countries the United States runs by far
the biggest base on the continent at
McMurdo within the part of the continent
that's claimed by New Zealand during the
warmer summer months McMurdo can host up
to 1,500 residents which is also about a
third of the entire human population
that's on Antarctica during those months
the US also runs the amonson Scott
research station at the geographical
South Pole and while the dozens of other
Count's bases are located all across the
rest of the continent most of them are
heavily concentrated in the relatively
warmer Antarctic Peninsula that
stretches up towards the southern tip of
South America Argentina and Chile
however as the two countries that are
geographically the closest ones to
Antarctica have put much more effort
than any of the others into actually
solidifying their territorial claims to
the continent they are the only two
countries who have so far gone to the
lengths of actually establishing
permanent civilian settlements on the
Frozen continent the argentinians at
esparanza base on the antartic Peninsula
and the Chileans nearby the peninsula on
King George Island with their Vias
estras the populations of each of these
settlements only ranges from a few dozen
in the winters to only a little more
than a hundred in the Summers which is
interestingly roughly equal to the
population of the first permanent Colony
that the English established in America
at Rano back in the 16th century in the
1970s and 80s the Argentinian and
Chilean governments both began sending
pregnant women to their settlements in
Antarctica so that they would give birth
to Argentinian and Chilean citizens on
Antarctic soil and therefore strengthen
their National claims to the territories
of Antarctica that they claimed
sovereignty over this culminated with
the first human being ever born on the
Antarctic continent with amelo Marcos
Palma on the 7th of January
1978 who's been followed by at least 10
additional Argentinian and Chilean
children since then since that time
Argentina and Chile have even built up
schools in their permanent settlements
on Antarctica that children are
currently busy attending right now and
remember that in addition to disputing
territory in Antarctica Argentina and
the United Kingdom also more bitterly
dispute the sovereignty of the nearby
Faulkland Islands along with South
Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
as well this dispute has historically
been far more controversial than their
disputed claims in Antarctica because
unlike Antarctica thousands of people
actually live here the Falklands are
presently controlled by the UK and have
a population of about 3,600 British
citizens which is gigantic compared to
the population of settlements in
Antarctica the UK has nearly
continuously administered the fauland
islands for nearly two centuries since
the 1830s but for various historical and
Geographic reasons Argentina has heavily
disputed bren's control of them for the
two centuries ever since the dispute
infamously came to a climax in 1982 when
Argentina unexpectedly launched a
fullscale amphibia invasion of the
Falklands along with South Georgia and
the South Sandwich Islands which sparked
a 10-week long war between Argentina and
the UK around the islands that killed
nearly a thousand soldiers and wounded
more than 2,000 others with major Naval
losses suffered on both sides
Argentina's invasion of the islands
ended up being decisively defeated by
the British the islands have remained
within the UK ever since and the dispute
over the Faulkland between them while
continuing has largely moved away into
the very far background of geopolitics
that is rarely brought up today in the
context of much larger disputes going on
in Ukraine and the Middle East but when
that recent russian-made discovery of
511 billion barrels of oil down there in
the middle of both of their claims in
Antarctica the Falin question could be
brought back to the Forefront for both
London and Buenos arees sooner rather
than later with the current market price
for a barrel of Brent crude oil being
$86.40 when I wrote this video on the
3rd of July 2024 those 511 billion
barrels of oil in the wetle sea could
theoretically be worth something to the
tune of $44 trillion
almost double the entire GDP of the
United States if a country or a
corporation could control this Antarctic
oil field and didn't give a damn about
international law and the Antarctic
treaty system they could literally
manage to Eclipse even Saudi Arabia as
the world's Mightiest oil power and
completely transform their entire
civilization in the process which is a
whole hell of an incentive to actually
do it the only thing standing in the way
right now from anybody doing that on
paper is the Antarctic treaty system
that strictly forbids anyone from
harvesting Antarctica's resources
beneath the 60° latitude line but that
treaty is actually up for review in only
24 years from now in 2048 and any
country involved with the treaty is
legally able to walk away from it and
withdraw whenever they want to right now
the 511 billion barrels of oil that the
Russians apparently discovered here are
better to think of as deposits rather
than as reserves since nobody can
legally access them but when the Artic
treaty comes up for review in 2048
Argentina the UK Chile and maybe even
other outside Powers will become heavily
motivated to begin allowing Drilling and
Mining to take place in Antarctica if
they stand to gain trillions of dollars
by doing so the ice cover in the wetle
sea where the oil field was discovered
is thinning out with climate change and
is increasingly becoming easier to
access by ship or offshore oil rig while
the Antarctic Peninsula to the West
protects the sea a bit from the often
violent Oceanic swell that swer SS
around the continent above it
nonetheless Antarctica in the wed sea is
still a very difficult place to actually
work in for now the location is
extremely remote and thousands of
kilometers away from civilizational
centers in Argentina or South Africa
while icebergs and Ice flows within the
sea can still pose a grave challenge to
the stability and safety of offshore oil
platforms extracting the oil deposit
here will undoubtedly be a prohibitively
expensive venture to try and undertake
which means that for now even if a
country like Russia didn't really care
about violating international law by
extracting the oil they'd still have to
deal with the cold Financial calculus
being against them that simply makes
extracting the oil not very economically
feasible but again in the not too
distant future as the ice cover in the
wettle sea thins out with climate change
and as the Antarctic treaty officially
comes up for review in 2048 some states
may be open to trying out their shot and
if Argentina can actually finally get
its economic act together over the next
couple of decades they might also become
interested in challenging the United
Kingdom over the status of the Faulkland
Islands again it is the UK's control
over the Falklands along with the
uninhabited South Georgia and the South
Sandwich Islands that forms the legal
basis for the UK's territorial claim in
Antarctica nearby that overlaps directly
with the argentinians claim and with the
gigantic Russian discovered oil field
hypothetically if and it's a huge if
Argentina were to somehow miraculously
become capable of pushing the British
out of the faland then Argentina would
greatly weaken the British claim in
Antarctica that overlaps their own and
they would greatly strengthen their own
claim to the gigantic oil field which
could allow the country to radically
transform itself the same way that Saudi
Arabia or the United Arab Emirates did
after the antartic treaty comes up for
review in 2048 by allowing themselves to
actually begin extracting some to even
all of that oil and at the same time the
UK will be well aware of this potential
challenge in the coming decades that
Argentina and potentially other nations
like Russia could Mount against them in
the area and so they will also be
heavily incentivized to maintain their
control over the Faulkland South Georgia
and the South Sandwich Islands at all
costs to maintain their own claim in
Antarctica and to the giant oil field as
well for whoever maintains control over
the field after 2048 could potentially
become the world's next Saudi Arabia and
for that reason the future of the
Antarctic continent is a deeply uncertain
uncertain
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