NASA is using the world’s fifth largest continent to help plan for missions of the future. Anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 scientists currently reside on the frozen desert throughout the year. However, a growing number of them are coming from the space agency.
Amazon Prime’s “Antarctica – An Adventure Of A Different Nature” revealed how NASA uses the isolated area to help prepare for space missions, including life on Mars.
The 1991 series took viewers into an area of Antarctica that was completely free of ice.
The narrator revealed: “Once these dry valleys were full of ice.
“Thousands of years ago something happened to the climate and the ice that was here disappeared.
NASA is using Antarctica to prepare for Mars (Image: GETTY/AMAZON PRIME)
NASA crews are located in three research faacilities (Image: GETTY)
This land is so arid we practice experiments deigned for Mars
“It left behind vast empty valleys where it has probably not rained for a million years where algae grows inside solid rock.
“This land is so arid we practice experiments designed for Mars.”
In the last 30 years, the space agency has stepped up its efforts.
NASA now has three main stations located in Antarctica: McMurdo, Palmer and ANSMET.
The McMurdo research facility is where the United States’ Antarctica Program (USAP) is now based.
Mars’ isolation is similar to Antarctica (Image: GETTY)
Antarctica has huge amounts of open space (Image: GETTY)
According to NASA’s website: “Scientists believe that Antarctica’s climate, terrain, temperature, and isolation provide an environment on Earth that most closely parallels the conditions of isolation and stress to be faced on long-duration human missions in space.
“This analogue provides a unique and accessible test bed to develop prototype systems and technologies for use on the moon and Mars.
“Research disciplines at McMurdo include astronomy, atmospheric sciences, biology, Earth science, environmental science, geology, glaciology, marine biology, oceanography, climate studies, and geophysics.”
While Antarctica could hold many answers over the mysteries of space, it also helps scientists understand the depths of the oceans too.
Scientists also drilled into the ice (Image: AMAZON PRIME)
What scientists found below stunned them (Image: AMAZON PRIME)
The same series detailed how researchers dug a hole 6ft deep into the ice cap and dived into the freezing waters.
It explained: “This is where Antarctica hides its colour and complexity, in forests of tiny plants called algae to grow in the ice like a greenhouse.
“Millions of krill, which are like small shrimp, eat the algae.
“Fish eat the krill and seals eat the fish.”
The cameras panned around the deep waters, revealing a habitat beaming with life, before the narrator revealed how important this dive was.
The narrator detailed: “This chain of life is so isolated and balanced it gives scientists clues to the health of the whole planet.
“Diving here is agony for the first 20 minutes, after that, it becomes dangerous.”
The divers then surfaced again and were helped out of the water.
Before that, scientists made an equally amazing discovery about the history of our planet from the ice of Antarctica.
The group drilled almost 500ft into an ice sheet to learn about how global warming is affecting the region during the same documentary.
Scientists dug into the ice (Image: AMAZON PRIME)
Scientists obseved a decline in the ozone layer (Image: WIKI)
The documentary’s narrator added: “Ice layers can read like the rings of trees and the climate record goes back 100,000 years.
“Entrapped bubbles of ancient air – the ice cores tell a simple story.
“When the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere change, so does the climate.
“From the crystal of the ice, the news from Antarctica is bad.
“Methane, strontium 90, lead, increased carbon dioxide, we are changing the air and we can see the effects.”
In May 1985, Joseph Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin observed a decline in the polar ozone was far larger than believed.
The discovery of the ozone hole was initially rejected as unreasonable but later studies showed that the concerns were valid.
Since 1991, the United Nations Environment Programme has sponsored a series of technical reports on the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion to reverse the effects.
In 2007, a report was released that showed the hole in the ozone layer was recovering and was the smallest it had been for around a decade.
The 2010 paper read: “Over the past decade, global ozone and ozone in the Arctic and Antarctic regions is no longer decreasing but is not yet increasing.
“The ozone layer outside the Polar regions is projected to recover to its pre-1980 levels before the middle of this century.”