The Dragon's Breath cave is the largest non subglacial lake in the world. The data comes from NASAs Operation IceBridge, a program that flies radar-equipped planes over the poles to map out glaciers and ice sheets in three dimensions. This genus, found in the Southern Hemisphere, is characterized by shorter necks and larger skulls. Associated mainly with wetland habitats such as ponds, lakes, rivers, bogs, and marshes, and usually thriving most in milder climates. But again, as with many weird things found in Antarctica, the explanation is much simpler. Dr. Williams confirmed to Gizmodo that dragon ice is a variation on pancake ice, which forms "when piles of slushy ice are shaped and sculpted by wave action or winds." The mysterious skeleton of a creature has been found on Google Maps in Antarctica in footage which has since gone viral. Antarctica is an ice covered continent. H.P. Vostok Lake of Antarctica is the largest subglacial lake in the world. Heres the technology that helped scientists find itand what it may have been used for. And when Habib, Hone, and Royal Tyrrell Museum paleontologist Franois Therrien compared the holes in the Canadian pterosaurs neck vertebrae against those for all other known azhdarchids, they found that its arrangement is unique. After completing her undergraduate degree in journalism and environmental studies at Ithaca College, Kacey pursued her master's in Specialized Journalism: Climate Change at USC Annenberg. Today, there are still accounts of reptilian monsters said to haunt and harass villages throughout the remaining corners of largely unexplored forests, mountains and oceans of the world. For a long time, paleontologists had instead assumed that the fossils belonged to a pterosaur called Quetzalcoatlus northropi, says study coauthor Dave Hone, a paleontologist at Queen Mary University of London. Fact or fiction .An ancient species of dragon was found living in Antarctica? He added: "I dont know if this recently thawed and this has been frozen for thousands of years or if this is something new. Dragonflies are widely spread throughout the world and can be found on every continent except Antarctica. NY 10036. Scientists just confirmed a 30-foot void first detected inside the monument years ago. He then proceeds to analyse the skeleton, before concluding that it could be an ancient dinosaur. Kacey Deamer is a journalist for Live Science, covering planet earth and innovation. No, this has nothing to do withGame of Thrones. At first, researchers believed the color was due to the red algae, but years later, it was revealed that the color is due to iron oxides, Forbes . All rights reserved, finally unearthed the heaviest known elasmosaur, Find out about a plesiosaur fossil found with a baby preserved in its body, mass extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, Would the dinosaurs have died out if not for that asteroid? Can we bring a species back from the brink? New York, She has previously reported for Mother Jones, the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, Neon Tommy and more. But, it could certainly be the subject of a song on their album! Now, this enormous species of giant pterosaur part of a group known as azhdarchids finally has a name: Cryodrakon boreas, drawing from the ancient Greek words that translate to "cold dragon of the north winds." The different colorings can actually be simply explained as frozen meltwater (blue), sediment (black) or algae (green) that were trapped while the iceberg was forming. The 'Dragon-skin' ice is very rare and has not been spotted in Antarctica since 2007 . The scientists found the secret subterranean habitat tucked away beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf a massive, floating sheet of ice attached to the eastern coast of the Antarctic peninsula that famously birthed the world's largest iceberg in 2021. Live Science is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Follow Kacey on Twitter. The massive explosion caused pressure waves that rang Earth's atmosphere like a bell, and sensors the researchers had placed on the ice's surface recorded similar pressure waves moving through the underground chamber. They are the slugs of the sea and live among other deep-sea creatures such as clams and coral. Tom Metcalfe writes about science and space for NBC News. During this brutal interaction between the polar ocean and atmosphere, the seawater freezes as freshwater ice, according to the researchers. Its intact. There are also indications other animals may be fixed to the boulder, such as tube worms, stalked barnacles, or hydroids, which are related to jellyfish. Schulp adds that the work moves our knowledge of plesiosaurs forward, and he is excited to see Argentine paleontologists go back out there and find more fossils. An illustration shows an elasmosaur swimming through rough waters. In order to survive, the organisms would have to feed on floating material from other animals or plants, because it is impossible for plants to photosynthesize in the sunless seawater. When does spring start? "Seeing the effect of the Tongan volcano, which erupted thousands of kilometres away, was quite remarkable," Stevens said. All 154 people on board survived after being rescued by nearby vessels. Crew-6 commander Stephen Bowen and pilot Warren "Woody" Hoburg, flanked by cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and United Arab Emirates flier Sultan Alneyadi, planned to strap . A Fish Equipped With Antifreeze. Bizzard was a young IceWing dragonet, covered in scars. This cycle produces 10 times more than the average amount of sea ice formed in the coastal polynyas, Williams said. "I know there are seals in Antarctica but I don't know how they would get 50 miles inland. There are not, nor. Something fascinating about their legendary predatory skills. Most of them were remnants of ancient marine creatures, or even the ancestors of modern-day ducks. Lovecraft would have probably loved to see this interesting creature. Why wetlands are so critical for life on Earth, Rest in compost? The abdomen is divided into ten segments. The more that he compared his measurements of Quetzalcoatlus to the Canadian fossil, the more he suspected it wasnt Quetzalcoatlus at all. The video has recorded nearly 300,000 views, sparking fierce debate among conspiracy theorists online. Read my disclaimerfor more information. 03 Mar 2023 23:42:27 Small mobile animals such as shrimp and crustaceans called sea fleas have been seen before beneath ice shelves, but no one expected to see stationary animals like these. Visit our corporate site (opens in new tab). Heres how it works. The egg case belongs to the class Clitellata worm, species of which are long extinct which makes it quite an extraordinary finding. "It looked like a loaf of bread, with a bulge at the top and narrow slope at the bottom," Stevens said. The team drilled down around 1,640 feet (500 meters) below the ice's surface using a powerful hot-water hose to reach the underground chamber. Son Doong is the largest cave in the world, and also contains a number of large underground lakes. Heres the science.). There are still animals out there that can break the rules that we have written for them.. "Antarcticais a very mysterious place. On active days, the team had to wait for the sun to defrost the soil before they could excavate, and every piece wrested from the dirt would then need to be shipped by helicopter to the Argentine Marambio Base a few miles away. To recognize the modern climate in the region where this pterosaur once roamed, they named the new pterosaur Cryodrakon boreas, or the cold dragon of the north winds. Habib, a fan of the TV show Game of Thrones, had also suggested Cryodrakon viserion, a reference to one of the shows dragons, in part because of its rise from the ice, and in part because the animal might have reached movie-monster proportions. The discovery of what appear to be sponges in the pitch-black seawater beneath almost half a mile of ice has biologists baffled. Flat-earthers believe that the North Pole is at the center of the world while the South Pole surrounds the Earth. They published . It could be an old dinosaur. Unless you get to scary Antarctica where Polar Gigantism is a thing. The animal, when alive, would not have been a frozen dragon, notes study coauthor Mike Habib, a paleontologist at the University of Southern California. NASA warns of 3 skyscraper-sized asteroids headed toward Earth this week. The bones bear scratches and an embedded tooth that appear to be from a scavenger, most likely a relative of Velociraptor. One of the weird things about Antarctica is that its very good at preserving things the Endurance was found very well preserved thanks to Antarcticas cold waters. Initially, the team thought their equipment was faulty. A new study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology describes a new pterosaur called Cryodrakon boreas, "frozen dragon of the north winds." The ice shelves under Antarctica are hiding numerous things unknown to humankind. This creepy looking fall was named Blood Falls because of its deep color resembling blood. All rights reserved, dug up from Canadas Dinosaur Provincial Park in 1992, Fossil Pictures Capture the Mystery of Dinosaurs. The SpaceX Crew-6 Falcon 9 rocket atop pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, awaiting a delayed launch to deliver a four-man crew to the International Space Station. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); I knew not of these creatures, nor, spooky happenings, in Antarctica. Heres the science, Related: See the Mystery and Beauty of Fossils. The cavern was also much wider nearer the roof. But now, scientists have finally unearthed the heaviest known elasmosaur, an ancient aquatic reptile that swam the seas of the Cretaceous period alongside the dinosaurs. Scientists just confirmed a 30-foot void first detected inside the monument years ago. Even in Antarctica, there were lots of happy elasmosaurs, Schulp says. Antarctica is ringed with more than half a million square miles of ice shelves the Filchner-Ronne is one of the largest, covering more than 160,000 square miles but boreholes have revealed an area of seafloor beneath them only the size of a tennis court. Photograph by Stocktrek Images, Inc. / Alamy. Multiple expeditions in the 19th century managed to reach the Antarctic Peninsula, and in 1911 Roald Amundsens party were the first people to reach the South Pole. Thanks to this nearly Manhattan-size gap in the ice, the entire glacier along with the surrounding ice sheet will likely disappear much more quickly. Most of the 45,000 meteorites found in Antarctica over the past century have only weighed a few grams, The Independent noted. "Imagine your standard ice-cube tray, filled once," Williams said in the announcement. A mans world? They estimate that the as-yet-unnamed elasmosaur weighed between 11.8 tons and 14.8 tons, with a head-to-tail length of nearly 40 feet. Unfortunately for any arachnophobes out there, Antarctica does have spiders, sort of. A National Geographic team has made the first ascent of the remote Mount Michael, looking for a lava lake in the volcanos crater. That guy is big! Schulp says from looking at photos of the bones. The azhdarchids are also known for reaching immense sizes, none more so than Quetzalcoatlus. These animals can sniff it out. The scientists will continue to study the newfound subsurface ecosystem and hope to learn more about how the nutrients in the water are cycled through Antarctica's underground water networks to support the abundance of life that lives there. While the boulder is located about 150 miles from the ocean, the direction of the currents beneath the ice shelf suggests the nearest plant life is up to 1,000 miles away, Griffiths said. This Antarctica expedition focused on recovering large volume samples of the 2-plus-million-year-old ice discovered four years earlier. Schulp has worked on some plesiosaurs from the Netherlands, but he says the aquatic reptiles are very different in the Southern Hemisphere. There is a 9- to 10-meter wingspan azhdarchid in this formation; whether or not thats exactly the same as the one weve described, you cant say 100-percent, Hone says. ", JUST IN:Stonehenge builders branded just as clever as us. However, despite being prominent in the satellite images, the groove initially eluded surface detection, Stevens said. . They were some kind of weird plesiosaurs that nobody knew.. Called the ugliest creature beneath the waves, the scotoplanes (scientific name) are what you get when you combine the terror of Cthulhu with the plump, pink and short-legged appearance of a piglet. The wall stops everything from falling over the edge of the Earth. 18 Antarctica's Blood Falls. Jupiter and Venus 'kiss' in a stunning planetary conjunction tonight. ", The YouTuber added:"I think this thing was frozen in time. As a point of comparison, Habib visited Canadas Royal Tyrrell Museum to see the partial pterosaur skeleton dug up in 1992, whose limb bone is among the best preserved in the world. The answer is fiction. "This changes our current understanding and models of these environments," Stevens said. The difference is that you can actually see something resembling them on Google Earth (coordinates 795839.25S 815732.21W). "The climate is changing, and some key focal points are yet to be understood by science," Steven said. It would have flying in a landscape that would have been reasonably temperate but a hell of a lot warmer than central Alberta is now.. (Though, it's been mentioned now, so kind of?) The seas around Antarctica are rich in marine (sea-living) animals, ranging from microscopic plankton to the largest animal ever to live on Earth, the blue whale. New Moai statue that 'deified ancestors' found on Easter Island, Lab-grown minibrains will be used as 'biological hardware' to create new biocomputers, scientists propose, Ancient Roman 'spike defenses' made famous by Julius Caesar found in Germany, 'Building blocks of life' recovered from asteroid Ryugu are older than the solar system itself, The ultimate action-packed science and technology magazine bursting with exciting information about the universe, Subscribe today and save an extra 5% with checkout code 'LOVE5', Engaging articles, amazing illustrations & exclusive interviews, Issues delivered straight to your door or device. Cavan Images via Getty Images. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The 15-ton elasmosaur adds to evidence that a vibrant marine ecosystem existed just before the dinosaur mass extinction. If youre not afraid of spiders yet, these scary things in Antarctica might change your mind if youre lucky enough to see them on an Antarctic cruise. CNN During a recent excursion to the icy plains of Antarctica, an international team of researchers discovered five new meteorites including one of the largest ever found on the continent.. The cavern first appeared in 2012 and most of the ice that once occupied it melted in the last three years.
This nearly whole, deep-black skull belongs to the most complete specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex on display in Europe, an individual nicknamed Tristan Otto. By Dustin Nelson. Related: Alarming heat waves hit Arctic and Antarctica at the same time. As detailed below the claim that the video shows a real dragon inside . One place I have not yet managed to get to maybe one day. So what happens if Thwaites melts? For 40 years, paleontologist Wann Langston worked off-and-on to complete the descriptionbut then he died in 2013, leaving the work unfinished. The 'dragon-skin' ice in Antarctica researchers warn is a sign of 'dark chaos' in the planet's frozen oceans. Enjoyed the post, a fascinating take on the place. The cavern sits where nearly 14 billion tons of ice used to be, all of which melted in the last few years. For me, as a Canadian who also works on pterosaurs, its pretty cool to get an actual name for an animal thats been kicking around for a while, says paleontologist Liz Martin-Silverstone, a research associate at the University of Bristol who wasnt involved with the study. (Image credit: Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies/University of Tasmania), Livescience.com-interesting-person-plain-button, Collapsing Beauty: Image of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf. This caught the team off guard, as they had not expected to find any type of life this far below the icy surface. The continent is rapidly melting, and a large chunk of the snow and ice is held back from the ocean only by an array of glaciers and ice shelves guarding the coasts. Sea Pigs H.P. The amber adds to fossil evidence that many dinosaurs. Two key advances offered a way off the Quetzalcoatlus merry-go-round. Which travel companies promote harmful wildlife activities? How metal.. I'm a fun-loving blogger and coach from New Zealand, living in the south of Albania! The 27 scientists from eight countries aboard the ship are researching Antarctic polynya, which are areaswhere ice forms rapidly due to "katabatic" winds, which can hit hurricane strengths. But to their surprise, the camera showed colonies of stationary animals attached to the rock probably sponges and related sea creatures. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. An international team is currently trying to finish the job. Unauthorized use is prohibited. In the icy badlands of Alberta, paleontologists have found a frozen dragon: a new genus of pterosaur that once soared over the heads of dinosaurs with a wingspan that stretched at least 16 feet. (University of Tasmania) Despite the frigid temperatures, Williams estimated that the ocean was generating more than 1,000 to 1,500 watts per square. You can unsubscribe at any time. The main reference fossil for Cryodrakon belonged to an individual pterosaur that had a roughly 16-foot wingspan. Discovered in 2010 in Montanas famed Hell Creek Formation of the late Cretaceous, the 40-foot-long fossil took four years to excavate and prepare. Did an ancient species of a dragon found living in Antarctica? Lovecraft would have probably loved to see this interesting creature. Dragon skin occurs when strong "katabatic" winds downslope winds that exist only over icy regions continually lift the polynya's surface ice, subsequently freezing the water below, according. Bats and agaves make tequila possibleand theyre both at risk, This empress was the most dangerous woman in Rome. The noisy red and blue part in the bottom corner comes from ice breaking off into the sea. It involved a civilization led by 10-12 foot tall "Pre-Adamites" with elongated skulls. Beyond spooky really because this beast morphed into any being it killed. Their eyes are compound -they consist of 24,000 ommatidia (or tiny eyes). But the question of how these animals get food will have to wait until another scientific expedition can visit the spot, perhaps equipped with a remotely operated underwater vehicle that can recover samples of the animals. Which travel companies promote harmful wildlife activities? The remains first gained notoriety for their scars. Researchers drilled more than 1,600 feet under the Larsen Ice Shelf. Animal life was not what scientists were expecting to find in the pitch-black seawater beneath almost half a mile of floating Antarctic ice, but it seems to have found a way with the discovery of sea creatures living in the extreme environment. It's thought both types of stationary animals are types of sponges or are related to sponges, but scientists did not expect to find them beneath the ice shelf, in pitch-blackness and hundreds of miles from the coast. Also, meteorites that fall to Antarctica are preserved in ice for a long time. Elasmosaurs make up a family of the plesiosaurs, which represent some of the largest sea creatures of the Cretaceous. A BONKERS conspiracy theorist claims to have found the skeleton of a "mysterious" creature on Google Earth. The groundbreaking promise of cellular housekeeping. Ice that looks like a dragon's scales may sound like something from an episode of "Game of Thrones," but researchers recently observed the rare type of sea ice known as "dragon skin" in Antarctica. Because the Canadian remains make up a partial skeleton, Habibs colleague Hone had enough material to place the pterosaur on the azhdarchid family tree. Here's how to watch. Their cold habitat has given them some interesting features. Thats awesome, Ryan, thanks a lot for sharing. The remains, previously only ever found in North America, were. 8 Spooky and Strange Things Found in Antarctica 1. This site contains affiliate links for products and services we recommend. Perhaps the most dragon-like mythological creatures found in Aboriginal mythology are the Rainbow Serpents. Scientists have found a tiny animal, Tullbergia, living under rocks in Antarctica's inland mountain peaks, where nothing should survive. While it is most likely some kind of big whale species, it still has a menacing, creepy air to it. The dragon skin ice was found among the continent's coastal polynyas,. We dont have a skull, but we have a lot of pieces of the specimen, OGorman says. It wasnt until this year that researchers have found out that the waterfall springs from a lake trapped under the ice for over a million years! If you make a purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you, I will earn a small commission (for which I am very grateful). Though Q. northropi was described in 1975, only one of its limb bones got a detailed writeup; the scientists who oversaw the giants remains never got around to publishing the rest. The way it flies - it's like it's hovering in mid-air, just like a dragon. This nearly whole, deep-black skull belongs to the most complete specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex on display in Europe, an individual nicknamed Tristan Otto. A National Geographic team has made the first ascent of the remote Mount Michael, looking for a lava lake in the volcanos crater. The "dragon-skin" sighting was an early highlight of the expedition, because the rare ice formation had not been seen in Antarctica since 2007, the researchers said.