The UnXplained

Legendary explorers

braving a deadly, frozen world.

-A massive government expedition... -(barking)

...shrouded in secrecy.

And strange new life-forms

buried beneath miles of solid ice.

Antarctica.

This frozen continent at the bottom of Earth

is a massive polar desert.

This desolate yet beautiful place

has captivated brave explorers for centuries.

And while its natural wonders are undeniable,

Antarctica is also steeped in myth,

legend,

and strange phenomena.

What secrets lie hidden

within the world's most mysterious continent?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

Antarctica.

Earth's southernmost continent.

This vast frozen world covers 5.5 million square miles

and is nearly the size

of the United States and Mexico combined.

Only 1,000 to 5,000 humans

are on Antarctica at any given time,

and most of these temporary residents

are small groups of scientists from around the world

who work and live in research outposts

that dot the landscape.

Those who are willing to endure

the extreme conditions of the White Continent

find themselves in a world

like no other.

My first visit to Antarctica was almost 20 years ago now.

I've always found Antarctica to be fascinating

because it is enigmatic.

When you get there, you're in awe of the sights that you see.

Antarctica is essentially covered in a huge slab of ice

that can be up to three miles thick in places.

And it has the coldest temperatures in the world,

but, also, it's the highest continent,

the driest continent, the windiest continent,

and the least populated place on the planet.

And it feels like nowhere else on Earth.

My first time getting to the ice,

it's otherworldly.

There's not a tree in sight.

Depending when you get there,

you're often either in 24-hour daylight

or 24-hour darkness.

The threshold between being perfectly safe

and "oh, my God, we're in trouble" is very thin.

Humans aren't built to survive in Antarctica.

It's mysterious and wondrous

because so few people get a chance to go.

The scientists visit it,

the explorers visit it,

but we all leave.

The things that catch your eye,

like the penguins and whales

and things, that's all on the coastal regions.

Once you go into the interior,

there's nothing that lives there that we know of.

So it's got an allure already.

There are so many questions to be answered.

Everything's unexplained about Antarctica.

While those who have ventured

to Antarctica have experienced freezing temperatures,

blinding storms,

and endless snow-covered terrain,

scientists have recently discovered geological evidence

that, millions of years ago,

the continent looked very different than it does today.

Antarctica hasn't always been covered in ice.

Just by fossils found in Antarctica,

we know that Antarctica was once covered in jungle,

that it was once covered in forest.

There are some people

who theorize that there could have been

ancient men in Antarctica.

And then all that was covered in ice.

So we know that there's a lot there.

But we don't know what's gonna be found.

-(birds singing) It's fascinating

to think that, 90 million years ago,

the South Pole was likely a lush forest

filled with plants, trees, and animals.

It would take a dramatic climate shift

around 56 million years later

to create the frozen landscape that we know today.

And while explorers would not lay eyes

on Antarctica until the 1800s,

great thinkers like Aristotle

had proposed the existence of a land at the bottom of Earth

thousands of years before it was discovered.

In ancient times, Antarctica captured our imaginations.

People suspected that Antarctica existed because it seemed right.

But it was an undiscovered land.

It seemed like there should be a land

in the southern regions of the planet.

It was suspected to be there, but there was no proof.

While cataloguing antiquities at the Topkapi Palace library,

German scholar Gustav Adolf Deissmann finds an unusual map

printed on gazelle skin parchment.

The remarkable 16th-century document is quickly recognized

as the work of the distinguished cartographer Piri Reis

and becomes an object of great importance

and heated controversy.

Piri Reis was an Ottoman admiral and cartographer.

In 1513, he produced an extraordinary map.

Only about a third of the map survives.

But that third offers something that's really surprising.

It looks like it is showing a coastline

of a southern continent.

And some argue that that coastline

looks very much like the coastline

of part of modern Antarctica.

And that leaves you to wonder,

how did he possibly know the coastline

of a continent that we didn't even know existed yet?

So it presumes

that some civilization either lived there

or was close enough to it in order to map it

and somehow that information made it back to Piri Reis.

It's certainly not proven, and we don't know.

Did Piri Reis create a map of the Antarctic coast

based on lost knowledge from a mysterious ancient civilization?

And if so, how did the famous mapmaker

come to learn about it?

Some experts think the answer can be found

in the folklore of a great seafaring people

who came not from the frozen desert

but instead from a tropical paradise.

The Polynesian peoples

of the Pacific have many culture heroes,

and these were great navigators

that would journey for many thousands of miles

from one end of the ocean to the other.

And these legends tell us

that they also went to a southern continent

that was naturally very, very cold.

They say that it's a place that's beneath the Earth itself.

It's a place of darkness,

but it's also a place of light,

in that the sun shines all the time there.

-(chirping) -And it's a place where rocks grow out of the sea

and there are strange animals

and what appears to be what we would describe as snow and ice.

And it seems very obvious

that they were reaching Antarctica.

It's intriguing to think

that the ancient world may have discovered Antarctica

centuries before explorers would catch a glimpse of it.

And while the belief in an unknown southern land

was well established in the 15th and 16th centuries,

the ability to actually set foot on this mysterious continent

would finally be possible in the late 1800s

in an era known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

-(barking) -MacFERRIN: At the time

of the age of exploration in Antarctica,

the South Pole, no one had ever been there.

Much like the highest point on Earth

or the lowest trench in the ocean,

getting to that point would be an historic achievement.

The two powers that were pushing to get to the South Pole first

were Great Britain and Norway.

Ernest Shackleton was a British polar explorer

in the early 1900s,

and he made a record at the time

of reaching the closest location to the South Pole,

getting within nearly 100 miles before having to turn around.

In 1911, Roald Amundsen,

the great Norwegian explorer,

becomes the first to reach the South Pole.

So Norway steals the glory.

These early explorers of Antarctica,

they were going into, kind of, almost like a black hole.

From 1897 to 1922,

ten countries were involved

in launching 17 major Antarctic expeditions

in the pursuit of scientific and geographical exploration.

Polar exploration is complicated.

At its core is a sense of national pride.

These early explorers were carrying

the flag of their country.

But it was also an effort to understand the world.

No one had been to Antarctica.

Was it one continent? Was it several large islands?

I mean, geographic knowledge was being gathered during that time.

It was also scientific-- learning about animal species.

They were kind of early field researchers.

It was this willingness to go forward and explore

and learn and advance human knowledge

that was one of the driving factors.

And whether they would come out or not was the question.

Despite the inherent dangers of Antarctic exploration,

-brave adventurers risked everything... -(barking)

...to reach the White Continent.

But once there, survival would require strong ships,

adequate supplies, trusted crewmates,