In the early 1990s, when the Antarctic cruise industry and the internet were still in their infancy , one of the biggest TV shows was The X-Files, where two FBI agents—one a skeptic, the other a true believer—would investigate mysteries from the extraterrestrial to the paranormal while shadowy government agents hid the truth from the public.
These days, conspiracy theories are a great way to generate attention online, so perhaps it’s inevitable that Antarctica would attract some of its own. Antarctica is a place that almost defies belief – those endless white expanses are a blank canvas for people to project their own stories onto. It’s somewhere that has been slow to reveal its secrets to scientists, but when it does, reality has often proved far more astonishing than any fantasy. In that spirit, we take a look at some of the most popular Antarctic conspiracy theories.
Theory: Antarctica is surrounded by a massive ice wall
Antarctica existed in the imagination long before anyone ever stepped foot there. The Greeks and Romans had imagined the existence of a great unknown southern continent. Early mathematicians knew the Earth was a globe rather than a flat disc, and deduced that the great continental landmasses of the northern hemisphere must be ‘balanced’ by an equally large continent in the South. Just as the far northern skies were circled by Arctos, the constellation of the Great Bear, the south would be mirrored by its opposite: ‘Antarctos.’
The first atlases, produced in the 16th century after the European discovery of the Americas, chose to include this theoretical continent that stretched all the way to the South Pole. It was called Terra Australis Incognita. In the 1770s, the Royal Navy’s Captain James Cook set out to find it. This was a truly imperial adventure as well as a scientific one, as many people believed that the continent could be a new America, with a temperate climate and a huge population with great prospects for trade.
Cook duly completed this first circumnavigation of Antarctica, though he famously never laid eyes on its shores, thanks to the impenetrable pack ice. This led him to declare that any land further south would be frozen to the point of desolation, though the idea that Antarctica could contain warm lands would prove to have a strange afterlife.
The truth about Antarctica is very often more spectacular than anything fiction can invent.
The first recorded sighting of Antarctica didn’t come until some 60 years later with an expedition led by Captain James Clark Ross. One of his most important discoveries was of what would later be named the Ross Ice Shelf in his honour, but which he simply named ‘The Great Barrier’. This was a seemingly endless wall of ice with cliffs a hundred metres high that barred any further progress. ‘We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the cliffs of Dover,’ he recorded. Images of this ice wall have proved to be catnip to modern conspiracy theorists insisting that it is the boundary marking the outer limits of a flat Earth but in fact, the Barrier was quickly penetrated by explorers like Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton alike. The truth, that scientists later revealed, was perhaps even more fantastic: the ice cliffs merely mark the limit of an ice sheet that is so massive that the entire country of France could sit comfortably inside it.
Conspiracy theory verdict? FALSE
Theory: There are secret Nazi bases in Antarctica
The path from the Ross’s Barrier to the Ice Wall is a great example of how an isolated fact can be spun into a fantastical story. One of the most popular Antarctic conspiracy theories does exactly that, using a little-known expedition from the 1930s as the basis.
The first of these was the German Antarctic Expedition of 1938-39, which was the first to carry out aerial surveys of Queen Maud land, east of the Weddell Sea. The Germans were keen to thwart Norwegian territorial claims to the area, so the expedition was instructed to drop markers from their planes to back up their claim. Of course, since this was the late 1930s Germany was run by the Nazi Party, so these markers were actually metal swastikas. While the mapping was complete, their research lay unpublished for several decades due to the outbreak of the Second World War.
Two months after the Nazi defeat in 1945, two German U-Boats surrendered in Buenos Aires, sparking a rumour that it had been carrying senior Nazis into exile in South America (there were none on board). The source of this invention was a Hungarian called Ladislas Szabo, who in 1947 wrote a book that tied the U-Boats to the German Antarctic Expedition, claiming that they had been part of a mission to carry the Nazi leadership to ‘New Berchetesgaden’, a secret base constructed by the earlier expedition. As the story grew in the retelling, even Hitler’s ashes were eventually relocated to this base and displayed in a spectacular ice cave to inspire a new Reich.
Ironically, the only base established by any of the wartime powers at Port Lockroy on the Antarctic Peninsula, during Britain’s Operation Tabarin, but this was more to do with establishing British sovereignty against South American claims in the region rather than fighting imaginary Nazis. The base is now better known to travellers today as the home of Penguin Post Office.
Conspiracy theory verdict? FALSE
Theory: There is a secret world hidden inside Antarctica
Another internet-popular conspiracy theory about Antarctica is that beneath its frozen exterior, it hides a secret tropical zone deep underground that is home to either an ancient civilisation or extra-terrestrials.
Stories about lost worlds in the polar regions have long been part of popular culture, with novels like Jules Vernes’ Journey to the Center of the Earth. The same year that Ross was on his way to discover his Barrier, Edgar Allen Poe even published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in which a whaling ship passes through the Antarctic pack to a verdant land populated by strange natives. But the real-world explorer who became the inadvertent midwife to even more outlandish theories was the American aviator Richard E. Byrd.
In 1928-29, Byrd made a series of long survey flights from his base on the Ross Ice Shelf, eventually being the first person to reach the South Pole since Amundsen and Scott. He also discovered an extensive series of mountain ranges, which were to inspire the pulp horror writer HP Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness of Antarctic explorers and eldritch terrors.
Byrd’s participation in Operation High Jump in 1947-48 would leave an even bigger mark. During one survey flight, the extraordinary Bunger Hills were discovered – an area surrounded by the ice sheet but remarkably snow free, with an unfrozen lake at its centre. Byrd called it one of the most remarkable places on the planet: ‘an island suitable for life had been found in a universe of death.’
Surround it with that mythical ice wall, and this Antarctic oasis starts warming up until it becomes positively tropical. Some conspiracy theorists lay claim to a secret Byrd diary where he records not just landing there but meeting people from an ancient civilization who lived there, whose advanced technology seemed to anticipate the post-Atomic jet age. Add in the fact that Operation High Jump was run by the US military at a time when Antarctica appeared to be on the cusp of becoming militarised, and you have fuel for a great conspiracy theory.
In fact, Bunger Hills is one of most remarkable places in Antarctica – with an array of lichens and mosses that turn parts of the land green, and an isolated marine lake with a unique seafloor community – expeditions from those of the Soviets and Poles in the 1950s to the Australians today have carried out research there to understand more about this unique environment.
Conspiracy theory verdict? FALSE
Truth is better than fiction
The internet is one of the greatest misinformation tools ever invented. It’s incredibly easy to take a fact and go viral by misrepresenting it. The irony with Antarctica is that the truth about this continent is very often more spectacular than anything fiction can invent. Scientists have only been exploring it for a little over a century, while the Antarctic Treaty, a miracle of international cooperation that reserved the entire continent for peace and science, is only six decades old.
Everywhere you turn, Antarctica shows itself to be far more interesting than science fiction about ice walls, Nazis and alien civilizations. Today’s scientists are drilling million-year-old ice cores, allowing us to come to terms with Antarctica’s deep geological time. And a tropical Antarctica? Well, even when Captain Scott froze to death on his way back from the South Pole, his team’s sledge was carrying plant fossils that revealed Antarctica’s humid prehistory 250 millions years ago, that would go on to help to prove the exciting new theories of plate tectonics and continental drift. With science like this, why go to the effort of creating even more outlandish stories?
But then, as any good conspiracy theorist might have it, we would say that, wouldn’t we? So we’ll finish one last thought. Many of the loudest theories hinge on the fact that the Antarctic Treaty keeps the continent closed, lest its great secrets be revealed to the world at large. That’s one that we definitely know to be untrue. We love nothing more than sharing Antarctica with others, so if you want to see it for yourself, drop us a line. The truth is out there.
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