The Truth About Antarctica

"Is there anything beyond the ice wall?"

"Quick question: Is there land beyond the ice wall?"

Record the ice wall, please.

These kinds of things are common in the comments sections of Dr. Peter Neff's TikTok videos. He's a glaciologist and ice scientist who spends the summer in Antarctica performing crucial research on the continent's enormous ice sheets and glaciers. Many of these statements are met with humour from him in return. He doesn't think too much about them, though, at the same time.

The "ice wall," or the notion that Antarctica is not a continent at the bottom of the world but rather a wall enclosing the Flat Earth, is a common refrain. Another common notion is that "nobody is allowed" to travel to Antarctica and that "they" (shady government officials) will forbid anyone from doing so in order to keep whatever is hidden behind the ice wall a secret.

The continent of Antarctica was still mostly unknown at the turn of the 20th century. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard noted in the introduction to his classic book The Worst Journey In The World (01922), "Even now, the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man's habitation." But even after more than a century of exploration, colonisation, and documentation, Antarctica continues to be completely foreign. The majority of people will never travel there because it is far away and unlike any other place on earth. They will only watch old films like The Thing (1982), which creates a mental sense of danger and solitude, in pictures.

Conspiracies emerge wherever there are information gaps in the general populace. Any post regarding Antarctica by a scientist or well-known person will unavoidably generate comments accusing the author of "hiding" information or of working for the government. The terrain of Antarctic conspiracies today is a convoluted web, with everything from flat-earthery to Nazis and UFOs to AI-generated Lovecraftian imagery ostensibly from early 20th-century missions. It is a hub of conspiratorial thought that is converging like lines of longitude on the ice from all points on the political compass.

These sentiments might seem strange, but they're just the latest in a long history of projecting fantasies onto the southern continent. While the Arctic, thanks to its relative proximity to seafaring civilizations, was explored beginning in the Age of Discovery in the 01500s, the terra australis incognito at the bottom of the earth remained mysterious for far longer. The circumnavigations of Captain Cook in the 01770s proved that the area was frozen and uninhabitable, and fringed by seemingly impenetrable pack-ice. The reports that he brought back probably inspired Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (01798), which launched tropes of the frigid Antarctic into the wider cultural consciousness.

It wasn't until the 1820s that the southern continent itself was discovered and charted by intrepid whaling captains. The simultaneous expeditions of Ross (Britain), D'Urville (France), and Wilkes (USA) in 1839 greatly increased our understanding of the Antarctic, but after that, research ceased for more than 50 years. In the 1890s, when the secrets of the North lost their allure, the world's focus shifted south to the Antarctic. The area appeared to suddenly offer great potential for scientific research, the annexation of new areas, and possibly even the extraction of mineral resources. The succeeding blatantly imperial Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration gave way to the mid-20th century's slightly more subtle geopolitical manoeuvring. The International Geophysical Year of 01957–58 brought this to a head, and the Antarctic Treaty of 01959, which demilitarised the continent and designated it as the sole domain of scientific research, was the outcome.

Conspiracy theories frequently focus on government and military actions during this Cold War era. Neff emphasises the value of the military presence in Antarctica, particularly that of the US military, saying that "their ability to operate their logistical capabilities are what give us the greatest scientific capability in Antarctica of basically any country."

Despite the fact that all military operations have been prohibited since the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, making Antarctica "the continent of science," the ongoing game of global geopolitics nevertheless serves as the driving force for activity in the region. Although military activity in and of itself is forbidden, the structures that allow people to live and work there are supported by the planes and men of numerous militaries.

This paradox is succinctly explained by Sara Wheeler in her transformational travelogue to Antarctica, Terra Incognita (01996): "Collective consciousness must believe in the deification of science on the ice, otherwise it would have to admit that the reason for each nation's presence in Antarctica is political, not scientific."

That's not to argue that the important climatic research conducted in Antarctica is inaccurate or corrupted in any way. Scientists like Neff simply want to be open about how they are able to carry out their research and go to the locations they do. According to him, organised government programmes are the greatest method to see these locations because they are so difficult to reach. But the concealment of the truth is something that the conspiracists may perceive but are unable to comprehend or describe, leading them to look for an explanation in the absurd. Due to this failure of the social cooperative fantasy, nut cases start to emerge.

Whether its proponents are aware of it or not, the original polar conspiracy of John Cleve Symmes Jr. is the source of many Antarctic ideas. A Cincinnati-born US Army lieutenant named Symmes dedicated his life to advancing his "hollow earth" theory. His assertions evolved over time, but the fundamental tenet of his theory persisted: the earth was a hollow shell 800 miles thick, with entrances at both poles that were 1,000 miles wide, allowing intrepid explorers access to a lush interior. He only published his ideas in privately produced circulars and booklets in the late 1810s, but by the early 1820s he had started giving public lectures around the nation. . He became somewhat well known, with his theories gaining traction after publication in outlets like the National Intelligencer; and it was his disciple Joshua Reynolds who helped drum up government support to launch the Wilkes Exploring Expedition of 01839, America’s first official venture to Antarctica.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1838, depicts the titular character being transported in an open boat below the Antarctic Circle to a tropical land inhabited by dark-skinned subhumans, and then to a frigid whirlpool at the North Pole that appears to lead to some sort of mysterious interior space inhabited by a giant shrouded figure: "And the hue of the skin of the figur'

A frequent underlying theme of Antarctic conspiracies is the desire for polar and Antarctic space to be ambiguous and unexplored, for something beyond human comprehension to be concealed beneath or within the ice.

Richard Byrd's Antarctic flights captured the world's attention in the middle of the 20th century, after the enthusiasm of the Heroic Age of Shackleton and Scott had subsided and the old school of isolated cross-continental man-hauling through ice and wind had been rendered obsolete by motors, planes, and radios. Early flight was pioneered by Byrd, a renowned US Navy officer. He led five different journeys to the Antarctic from the 01920s through the 01950s and claimed to be the first person to fly over the North Pole in 01926 (though this claim has since been refuted thanks to information afterwards uncovered in Byrd's notebook).The last three of these missions were carried out by the US government; the first two were independent. Byrd led two expeditions: Operation Highjump in 01946-7, which resulted in the establishment of Little America IV, a research base on the Ross Ice Shelf; and Operation Deep Freeze in the 01950s, a sizable undertaking that saw the first permanent American bases—built by Navy Seabees—at McMurdo and the South Pole.

These missions serve as the foundation for a vast network of conspiracies, along with Byrd himself. There are numerous claims regarding what Byrd "really" saw underground in the comments section of a newsreel footage about his expedition. One prevalent version of the story, purportedly written in a recently discovered "lost diary," is detailed in the Ancient Aliens episode concerning Byrd's "discoveries" While flying over the continent, Byrd encounters a race of UFO-flying dwellers who are dissatisfied with humanity's use of nuclear power and lands in a fertile hollow earth. Alternately, Operation Highjump required the return of such a sizable expeditionary force to Antarctica because he encountered and engaged Nazi-piloted flying saucers.

Nazis in the Antarctic? There is a grain of truth in it, I suppose. The Third Reich dispatched an expedition to investigate and conquer a portion of Antarctica in 1939. The planes on the Schwabenland dropped countless numbers of iron swastikas over the ice as they inspected, but none of them have ever been found.

By the conclusion of the war, the Norwegians had already given up their claim to a remote area of Dronning Maud Land, but the idea of a Nazi outpost in the Antarctic persisted, messy pushed into the larger world of Antarctic conspiracies. Numerous versions of the "Antarctic Nazis" myth have been circulated, some of which contend that Hitler and other senior Nazi figures did not actually perish but instead sought refuge at a subterranean base in New Schwabenland, while others incorporate advanced Nazi technology in the form of UFOs and weapons.