Researchers Keep Finding Grim 'Reminders' Inside The Frozen Crevasses Of Antarctica
Antarctica is a dangerous continent: temperatures easily reach -130 F, winds whip at 200 mph, and unseen hazards hide beneath the snow. There’s a clear reason why this landmass was never colonized. Though no one settles permanently on the island, researchers and explorers do temporarily live there — and they keep stumbling over reminders of the continent's brutal history.
Buzz's Trip
When Buzz Aldrin — the man who so famously walked on the moon with Neil Armstrong — arrived in Antarctica, he didn't stay for long. The former astronaut, 86 years old at the time, was immediately transported to a medical facility in Christchurch, New Zealand. He came to understand the lesson all experts on the continent learn.
The Continent That Fights Back
Living on Antarctica is hard. “Humans are the only wildlife," said Andy Martinez, the technical manager at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station. There is "not even a mosquito." Desolate, and like nothing else on Earth, the continent wallops the unprepared — even if you once went to the moon. Even still, it's truly the apple of the scientific eye.
The Antarctic Treaty of 1961
When The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1961, the legislation ensured the continent would be free from the issues plaguing so many nations across the world. Militaries couldn't build bases, and leaders couldn't send workers to mine the continent for minerals. It was a shared space, dedicated completely to science — which could lead to serious breakthroughs.
En Masse
So, on a freezing landmass free of war, mining, and political strife, researchers could focus on what truly mattered: science, technology, and understanding the world we live in. Biologists, oceanographers, geophysicist, marine experts and more thrived in a hub where they could work unfettered. Still, the job carried plenty of risks; researchers weren't unaware of what made their studies possible.
Too Late
Robert Falcon Scott led a team of 11 British explorers on a journey to the South Pole. The group arrived on January 17, 1912, three weeks behind Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s team. The British were disappointed — and this was only the beginning of their troubles.
Failings and Weaknesses
Captain Scott "was a very rounded, human character,” historian of polar exploration at the University of Manchester Max Jones said. “In his journals, you find he’s racked with doubts and anxieties about whether he’s up to the task and that makes him more appealing. He had failings and weaknesses too.”
"Willing to Die"
“They were prepared to risk their lives and they saw that as legitimate," Max Jones said. "You can view that as part of a mindset of imperial masculinity, tied up with enduring hardship and hostile environments. I’m not saying that they had a death wish, but I think that they were willing to die.”
No Pressure
Before Robert set off, Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son and the president of the Royal Geographical Society, gave a speech about how proud he was of the explorer’s mission: “… the self-respect of the whole nation is certainly increased by such adventures as this.” High praise only went so far.
Unnecessary Risks
Robert knew he’d face scrutiny for not getting to the South Pole first. His worry about this external pressure drove him to push his men to travel quickly back home. With their dwindling supplies, they urgently needed to get to the nearest food depot to replenish.
Trapped Together
When they were 11 miles away, a blizzard trapped the men. They grew weak from hunger and quietly died, huddled together in their tent under the snow. “I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through,” Robert wrote in his diary.
A Frozen Tomb
These deaths and horrors were never far from the minds of researchers that worked in the harsh environments of Antarctica without even mosquitos for company. As nations sent their brightest minds to the continent for more studies, the experts started uncovering physical evidence of a brutal past.
First Remains
The oldest remains found deep within the arctic tundra belonged to an indigenous Chilean woman. Her bones were discovered on the shore of Livingston Island in the ‘80s. The woman died when she was only 21, which would have been around 1820. Experts had questions: How did a Chilean woman die on Antarctica?
Braving The Journey
Between Antarctica and Chile is 620 miles of rough ocean, making the journey virtually impossible for one person. Scientists believe the woman was a guide for a sealing ship. William Smith found the island in 1819, so an excited sealing crew could have made the journey.
Uneasy Interaction
In the 1800s, women rarely were involved with seafaring. Sailors did have a trading relationship with Indigenous Chileans — the groups would exchange seal skins and knowledge. Interactions weren’t always peaceful though. The male sailors weren’t afraid to use force.
Stealing Women
“The sealers could just take a woman from one beach and later leave her far away on another,” Melisa Salerno, an archaeologist at Argentinean Scientific and Technical Research Council, said. This could be the origin of the mysterious woman’s bones on the Antarctic beach.
Incomplete Grieving
These are only a few of the freak accidents that dot the harsh continent. For those who have lost friends or family members in Antarctica, grieving can be difficult — their bodies are often unreachable. This happened to geophysicist Clifford Shelley.
Missed Goodbyes
Clifford’s friends Geoffrey Hargreaves, Michael Walker, and Graham Whitfield were lost in an avalanche on the side of Mount Peary in 1976. Their remains were never recovered. “You just wait and wait, but there’s nothing. Then you just sort of lose hope,” Clifford said. Without death rites, he struggled with his friends’ demise.
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Unprocessed Trauma
“I don’t think we did really process it,” he says. “It remains at the back of your mind. But it’s certainly a mixed feeling, because Antarctica is superbly beautiful, both during the winter and the summer. It’s the best place to be and we were doing the things we wanted to do.” Unsurprisingly, Clifford isn't the only scientist bearing this grief.
Walking On The Ice
In August 1982, Ambrose Morgan, Kevin Ockleton, and John Coll traveled to Petermann Island during the Antarctic winter. They were treated to the southern aurora while they walked across the sea ice to the island. The trio made it to a hut as a storm blew in.
Worsening Situation
The weather destroyed the ice, but the explorers had a month’s worth of supplies in their hut. More storms followed the first one, and the sea didn’t reform. They used a battery-powered radio to talk to their base until this ran out of power.
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Potential Escape
Once the radio was dead, the men felt overcome by frustration. They were getting sick from their supplies and had to resort to eating the nearby Gentoo and Adelie penguins. The base saw the men waving to them through a telescope on Friday, August 13. That day the sea ice started to reform.
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Beaten By Weather
Unfortunately, before a rescue mission was mounted, another enormous storm hit the island, once again taking the sea ice with it. When the winds abated, the base couldn’t find any of men who likely died while attempting to cross the ice before the storm.
Unlucky Researchers
Another ill-fated group of travelers were in Antarctica on October 14, 1965. Jeremy Bailey, David Wild, and John Wilson rode in the cab of a Muskeg tractor, while John Ross sat on a sledge attached to the back. They’d been traveling for most of the day.
Difficult Navigation
The men inside the cab were carefully scanning the terrain through a windscreen. Snow covered the screen, making it difficult to see. While John watched the Stella Group mountains in the distance, he noticed the Muskeg had stopped. He was buried under layers of thick clothing and didn’t hear anything.
Horrible Situation
Turning around, John realized the tractor had vanished. Another sledge ahead of his was jammed inside of a hidden crevasse and the Muskeg was another 100 ft inside. John noticed that the tracks dug into one icy wall, but the cab was smashed on the other side.
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One Survivor
John yelled into the large crevasse for 20 minutes before getting a reply from Jeremy. He who let John know he was gravely hurt and that the others were dead. John tried to climb into the crevasse to reach Jeremy, but the man succumbed to his injuries.
Learning And Remembering
The deaths of these brave explorers and scientists have influenced safety procedures for those still working in Antarctica. There’s also a monument to their lost lives: half stands at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands and the other was placed at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
Base W
The small outpost is called Base W. Established in 1956 by the British Antarctic Survey, or BAS, its original purpose was multifaceted: inhabitants would study the weather, map the island and surrounding area, and gather geology data.
Preparations
Although the location was remote, researchers were able to construct several facilities at the base. They built a large main hut to work and live in, a shelter for their sled dogs, an emergency storeroom, an anemometer tower, and two radio masts.
For a Decent Crew
During its normal operation, the tiny base would hold between 8 and 10 people. Supply ships came every few months to bring fresh supplies, new researchers, and various parts for repairs.
Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat
The facility at Base W also briefly held a post office, though it would've been rudimentary compared to our current standards. The staff just collected mail to send on the nearest boat or plane to South America.
A Decade Approaching
Through 1957 and 1958, the base was active and provided valuable contributions to the global scientific community's understanding of Antarctica. Things seemed to be going well — up until the winter of 1958-1959.
Detaille Island
Over the winter, the sea ice surrounding Detaille Island had frozen particularly strong and thick. This was great for expeditions, as it allowed the Base W team to venture from the island over the ice to the Antarctica mainland.
Frozen Barriers
However, when springtime came and a BAS ship was due to come and relieve the crew from their post, it couldn't break through the ice. Two U.S. icebreaker vessels were called in to help — but they couldn't forge a path, either.
The Choices Ahead
As the short Antarctic warm season reached its peak, the ice wasn't getting any thinner, and soon the little that had melted would begin to refreeze as winter came again. Base W's team had to make a difficult decision.
Going Home
They would run out of supplies if they stayed longer without a ship getting through. So, in March of 1959, the researchers packed up their essential belongings and gear, rounded up the dogs, and sealed up the Base W buildings.
Transport
The distance to the nearest coastline was over 25 miles away, all an uncharted trek over flat sea ice. However, they had no other choice. So they said goodbye to the base and made the hike to the sea, where the supply transport waited.
Port Lockroy
Whatever hopes the researchers had of returning to their little outpost were gone by the end of 1959. The BAS decided to permanently abandon Base W, preferring to set up camp at a more suitable northern location, called Port Lockroy.
Mail and Penguins and Ice
So, for many years, the old base lay empty. In Port Lockroy, the post office was reinstated, along with a four-person crew who handled mail and studied the local colony of 2,000 gentoo penguins.
Letters In and Out
Through the decades, the newer base thrived, with many curious tourists coming to the area to see penguins and achieve their life goals of setting foot in Antarctica. As tourism picked up, over 70,000 pieces of mail were sent from the port during a given cruise season.
The Old Spot
In 1996, after substantial use, the base at Port Lockroy needed a renovation. Various upgrades were put in place, and a small museum and gift shop were set up to enhance the tourist experience. At the same time, renovators remembered the old Base W just down the coast.
The Time Capsule
They made the trek over to see it, and when they opened its doors, they found a perfect time capsule of 1959 waiting for them. All of the old supplies and tools were in their original place, and the walls hadn't faded from the trendy '50s jadeite green.
The Secret Sauce
Canisters of food still lined the walls, their contents nearly forty years old. Dried vegetables, tinned fruits, and even condiments like the British favorite HP sauce remained sealed and uneaten.
Work In Progress
In the office area, the old research team's notes still lay on the desk. They had been mapping the surrounding landscape up until their departure, as evidenced by hand-drawn maps and a protractor, left slightly askew alongside a pair of binoculars.
Perfect Preservation
Incredibly, there was no damage to the facility or its contents. Its remote location, and cold weather conditions, were perfect for ensuring that everything stayed well-preserved, down to leftover headphones and other electronic communications equipment.
The Realization
The 1996 restoration team realized they had a unique museum at their fingertips, so they didn't rearrange it. Besides a little cleaning and winter-proofing, they left the base as they found it, sealed it up again, and returned to Port Lockroy.
Official
From then on, Base W became a museum, complete with plaques and visitor information installed in 2011. It's unlocked, and as long nobody disturbs its artifacts, it remains open to any explorer who can reach it.
A Glimpse of 1959?
Some research today suggests a trip to Base W might not be the only way to get a glimpse of 1959. Conducting a high-flying experiment in Antarctica, these NASA scientists have possibly stumbled upon clues very closely connected to our past.
Pushing the Limits
You usually can't make a career out of playing with balloons, but that's exactly what Peter Gorham has done. A physicist at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, he has developed technology that's challenged much of the status quo.
Meet ANITA
Gorham's work has helped reshape what we know about the subatomic particles that make up our world. Of course, he hasn't done it alone. The physicist has made such strides thanks to his good friend ANITA...who happens to not be human at all.
Not Quite Paradise
ANITA stands for "Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna." As you can probably tell from the full definition, this antenna's functionality often pulls Gorham away from his lush Hawaiian campus and sends him to a far less hospitable environment.
A Special Environment
With funding from NASA, the ANITA project brought Gorham and other physicists and astronomers to the wastelands of Antarctica. To outsiders, it seemed like an unnecessary relocation, but this locale offers a testing feature unavailable anywhere else on the planet.
No Interference
Because Antarctica is basically uninhabited — unless you count the penguins — there is no radio interference to block ANITA's findings. Here, Gorham would hopefully observe some of the strangest and most elusive particles known to mankind.
Neutrino Quest
Like his colleagues at the nearby IceCube Observatory, Gorham was after neutrinos. These rare particles were only discovered in the mid-20th century, and their unusual properties fly in the face of many long-held physical laws.
Unique Properties
While neutrinos are theoretically all around us, they have the ability to pass straight through other matter — perhaps because they often contain high electrical charges allowing them to move at the speed of light. We still don't know how they fit into the blueprint of reality.
Inflated Ideas
So how did Gorham expect to find any neutrinos in the antarctic sprawl? That's where his balloon came in. Ferrying the ANITA device inside of it, the balloon could scan a broad area and analyze subatomic activity.
Flying High
"It flies over the Antarctic continent as a stratospheric balloon payload and looks for the signatures of high-energy neutrinos that crash into some atom in the ice," Gorham explained. But he was unable to sum up their findings from 2016 so easily.
Initial Failures
The first couple times the scientists sent up ANITA, they didn't pick up on much of anything. They met an unusual amount of interference on the scanners, but little else. It took until their third attempt to actually see something.
Strange Observations
In short, the scientists witnessed "impossible events." While most of the particles they observed followed the expected patterns of scientific theory, the ANITA researchers saw neutrinos go the opposite way. It all occurred in the sheet of ice.
Down to Earth?
Most of the particles that ANITA picked up on were coming down and crashing into the ice, which makes sense. What goes up must come down. But there were some tau neutrinos flying straight up from the Earth.
Making Sense
So, assuming ANITA was reading their movement correctly, the only way that these neutrinos could move through the planet in this manner is if their fundamental nature was somehow changing back and forth as they made the journey. One wild theory could explain this.
Parallel Universes
Perhaps, Gorham suggested, there could be an alternate universe with alternate laws of reality that produced these upward-moving neutrinos. For this other world to have such a phenomenon, time would have to flow backwards.
The Big Bang
As a pure hypothetical, it's not absolutely out of the question for another universe to exist. One could've been born out of the same Big Bang that likely played a part in our creation, except this reality took on a different set of rules.
Plenty of Time
The broader implications of this idea are hard to wrap one's mind around. It's hard to picture a similar universe that was created at the same time as ours but is progressing from the future to the past. Granted, this isn't the first time a scientist has posited that time could be more flexible than we think.
Einstein's Theory
Everybody has heard about Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, even if they can't explain it themselves. In essence, it holds that time changes based on the given velocity of any given body. So has ANITA taken this time-bending idea a step further?
Not So Fast
Probably not, as there are many other factors to consider before accepting this parallel universe. "If these events are real and not just due to oddities in the detector, then they could be pointing to physics beyond the Standard Model," described IceCube researcher Alex Pizzuto.
Continuing Analysis
The scientific community needs to confirm the validity of this neutrino movement before they can even humor the idea of a parallel universe. More likely, this finding will just reshape how Gorham and other physicists approach particle theory. But nobody can toss out that explanation just yet.
Alternative Believers
Less mainstream thinkers — though far less credible than physicists — insist that other dimensions exist. A self-described paranormal expert, Fiona Broome, has experienced her fair share of unexplained phenomena over the years. Spirits, shades, and other ghostly entities are among the many otherworldly beings she's claimed to have come across since the early 1980s.
But perhaps Fiona's strangest experience came in 2009, when she was invited to speak at Atlanta's annual sci-fi/fantasy convention, Dragon Con. While sitting in the convention's green room, Fiona struck up a conversation with the other speakers and discovered an usual similarity among the group.
Apparently, they all seemed to clearly remember former South African president Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s and the widespread media coverage of his funeral that followed. In reality, Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and died 23 years later in 2013.
Most of the speakers wrote it off as mere coincidence, each of them believing they'd fallen victim to the same widely circulated bit of misinformation. Fiona, however, wasn't convinced — in her experience, there were no such thing as coincidences.
On the advice of one of her editors, Fiona created a site dedicated to this newfound phenomenon, an experience she coined the "Mandela Effect." Almost immediately, online users began chiming in to share their thoughts on the subject.
At first, the conversations were light, with some drawing parallels between the Mandela Effect and various works of science fiction. Soon, however, users began coming forward with their own accounts of the phenomenon, including memories of Mandela's death nearly identical to Fiona's.
Eventually, the discussion expanded beyond Mandela's death, with many users finding they had identical memories of things that never existed, as well as those of an alternate historical timeline. So many shared false memories of oddly specific, niche topics.
While talk of the Mandela Effect was primarily contained within Fiona's website for the first few years, it grew beyond the site in 2015. Upon the online community's realization that the Berenstein Bears children's books were actually spelt "Berenstain," the Mandela Effect quickly became a viral sensation.
Since then, hundreds of Mandela Effect-related discussions have popped up online with some truly mind-bending revelations. For example, instead of saying "Mirror, mirror on the wall..." the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs actually says "Magic mirror on the wall..."
What about Darth Vader's most famous line in Star Wars? While most people would insist that he tells Luke Skywalker, "Luke, I am your father," he actually doesn't say "Luke" at all.
The Mandela Effect has also been observed in the spelling of brand names. Is it "Febreeze" or "Febreze"? "Fruit Loops" or "Froot Loops"? "Sketchers" or "Skechers"? In every case, the latter spelling is correct.
Even colors have fallen victim to the Mandela Effect. While some people are adamant that the color chartreuse is a maroonish-red or reddish-magenta, it's actually somewhere between yellow and green.
As this phenomenon continues to puzzle the online community, many have asked if there's any real basis for why we experience the Mandela Effect. According to Fiona, the explanation is even more bizarre than the phenomenon itself.
In Fiona's words, "The Mandela Effect is what happens when someone has a clear memory of something that never happened in this reality." She posits that from time to time, alternate realities overlap and take us along for the ride, bringing us into a world just slightly different from our own without us realizing.
From a scientific standpoint, the concept of a "multiverse" containing universes parallel to our own is one scientists generally tend to avoid, as we currently lack the means of determining the plausibility of such a claim. Still, being that the Multiverse Theory can't be proved or disproved, there's still a chance that alternate dimensions may be out there.
So, does that really mean there's a universe where Darth Vader addresses his son by name? Or one where we spray our homes with "Febreeze" instead of "Febreze"? Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on which side of the argument you're on), there is a rational explanation behind the Mandela Effect.
Simply put, this phenomenon is just the reinforcement of misremembered information to the point that it subconsciously becomes fact. You likely remember the "Berenstain Bears" as "Berenstein" because you read the books decades ago and eventually began to equate the pronunciation of the name with its spelling.
As for multiple people having identical memories of the same nonexistent name or event, this is simply a product of social reinforcement of misinformation. If you watched Star Wars twice as a kid but heard "Luke, I am your father" repeated dozens times in the years that followed, chances are you were convinced the line was correct.
And, of course, there's the internet. In this era of "fake news," if enough people insist that a fact is true — especially one you're more than willing to believe —then you're absolutely going to take it at face value.
So while the Mandela Effect unfortunately isn't proof of a parallel universe (yet), it does serve as a warning of how dangerously flawed our memories can be. Yet our memories aren't entirely to blame: for our entire lives, we've been fed lies about some of history's most notable figures and events.
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