Hi, it's Ted Talks Daily Amelie's you you may think of it as just a giant sheet of ice, but on Antarctica you can find an oasis of life that's invisible to the naked eye. We're talking about microbes. And Ariel Waldman is an Antarctic explorer, a NASA adviser who explores this kind of wildlife at the microscopic scale. In her Ted 20-20 talk, she shares the wonder of the continent that is indeed 98 percent ice and why its ecosystem is powerful and crucial to life on this planet.

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What if I told you there's a place where the creatures are made of glass or that there are life forms are invisible to us, but astronauts see them all the time. These invisible glass creatures aren't aliens on a far away exoplanet. They're diatoms, photosynthetic single celled algae responsible for producing oxygen and helping seed clouds on a planetary scale and with intricately sculpted geometric exoskeletons made of glass.

You can see them in swirls of ocean surface colors from space, and when they die, they're glass houses sink to the depths of the oceans, taking carbon out of the air and with them to the grave, accounting for a significant amount of carbon sequestration in the oceans. We live on an alien planet. There is so much weird life here on Earth to study, and so much of it lives at the edges of our world, of our site and of our understanding.

One of those edges is Antarctica. Typically, when we think about Antarctica, we think of a place that's barren and lifeless, except for a few penguins, but Antarctica should instead be known as a polar oasis of life host to countless creatures that are utterly fascinating. So why haven't we seen them on the latest Nature documentary? Well, they lurk beneath the snow and ice, virtually invisible to us. Their microbes, tiny plants and animals living embedded inside of glaciers underneath the sea ice and swimming in subglacial ponds.

And they're no less charismatic than any of the megafauna that you're used to seeing in Nature documentary. But how do you compel people to explore what they can't see? I recently led a five week expedition to Antarctica to essentially become a wildlife filmmaker at the microbial scale with one hundred and eighty five pounds of gear. I boarded a military aircraft and brought microscopes into the field to film and investigate these microscopic extremophiles so that we can become more familiar with a poorly understood ecosystem that we live with here on Earth.

To film these invisible creatures in action, I needed to see where they call home. I needed to venture under the ice. Every year, the sea ice nearly doubles the entire size of Antarctica. To get a glimpse below the nine feet thick ice, I climbed down a long metal tube inserted into the sea ice to witness a hidden ecosystem full of life, hoping suspended between the sea floor and the illuminated ceiling of ice. It was just absolutely magical.

Some of the critters I found were delightful things like sea shrimp and many more beautiful geometric diatoms. I then went farther afield to camp out in the dry valleys for a couple of weeks. Ninety eight percent of Antarctica is covered with ice and the dry valleys are the largest area of Antarctica where you can actually see what the continent itself looks like underneath all of it. I sampled bacteria at Blood Falls, a natural phenomenon of a subglacial pond spurting out iron oxide that was thought to be utterly lifeless until a little more than a decade ago.

And I hiked up a glacier to drill down into it, revealing countless hard core critters living their best lives well, embedded inside layers of ice known as Crich, a night holes they form when tiny pieces of darkly colored dirt get blown onto the glacier and begin to melt down into soupy holes that then freeze over, preserving hundreds of dirt pucks inside the glacier like little island universes, each with its own unique ecosystem. Some of the critters I found you may recognize, like the Dorival tardigrade.

I absolutely love them. They're like little gummy bears, the claws. Also known as a water bear, they're famous for possessing superpowers that allow them to survive in extreme conditions, including the vacuum of space, but you don't need to travel to space or even Antarctica to find them. They live in mosques all over this planet, from sidewalk cracks to parks. You'll likely walk right by tons of these invisible animals every day. Others may look familiar, but be stranger.

Still like nematodes, not a snake nor an earthworm. Nematodes are a creature all their own. They can't regenerate like an earthworm or crawl like a snake. But they have tiny dagger like needles inside their mouths that some of them use to spearfish their prey and suck out the insides. For every single human on this planet, there exist fifty seven billion nematodes. And some of the stories you may not recognize at all, but live out equally fascinating lives such as rotifers with amazing crowns that turn into Roomba like mouse silicates, with digestive system so transparent that it's almost TMI and cyanobacteria that look like party confetti exploded all over a petri dish.

A lot of times what we see in popular media are scanning electron microscope images of microorganisms looking like scary monsters without seeing them move, their lives remain elusive to us, despite them living nearly everywhere. We step outside. What's their daily life like? How do they interact with their environment? If you only ever saw a photo of a penguin at a zoo, but you never saw one waddle around and then glide over ice, you wouldn't fully understand penguins by saying micro creatures in motion, we gain better insights into the lives of the otherwise invisible without documenting the invisible life in Antarctica and our own backyards.

We don't understand just how many creatures we share our world with. And that means we don't yet have the full picture of our weird and whimsical home planet.

Thank you. PR ex.