WEBVTT

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Can you guess what this is?

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What if I told you there's a place
where the creatures are made of glass?

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Or that there are lifeforms
that are invisible to us

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but astronauts see them all the time?

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These invisible glass creatures
aren't aliens on a faraway exoplanet,

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they're diatoms:

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photosynthetic, single-celled algae
responsible for producing oxygen

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and helping seed clouds
on a planetary scale.

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And with intricately scultped,
geometric exoskeletons

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made of --

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yeah --

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glass.

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You can see them in swirls
of ocean-surface colors from space

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and when they die,

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their glass houses sink
to the depths of the oceans,

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taking carbon out of the air
and with them to the grave,

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accounting for a significant amount
of carbon sequestration in the oceans.

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We live on an alien planet.

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There is so much weird life
here on Earth to study

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and so much of it lives
at the edges of our world,

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of our sight,

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and of our understanding.

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One of those edges is Antarctica.

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Typically, when we think of Antarctica,

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we think of a place
that's barren and lifeless ...

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except for a few penguins.

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But Antarctica should instead be known
as a polar oasis of life,

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host to countless creatures
that are utterly fascinating.

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So why haven't we seen them
on the latest nature documentary?

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Well, they lurk beneath the snow and ice,

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virtually invisible to us.

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They're microbes.

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Tiny plants and animals living
embedded inside of glaciers,

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underneath the sea ice

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and swimming in subglacial ponds.

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And they're no less charismatic
than any of the megafauna

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that you're used to seeing
in a nature documentary.

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How do you compel people
to explore what they can't see?

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I recently led a five-week
expedition to Antarctica

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to essentially become a wildlife
filmmaker at the microbial scale.

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With 185 pounds of gear,

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I boarded a military aircraft

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and brought microscopes into the field

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to film and investigate
these microscopic extremophiles

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so that we can become more familiar
with a poorly understood ecosystem

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that we live with here on Earth.

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To film these invisible
creatures in action

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I needed to see where they call home.

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I needed to venture under the ice.

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Every year, the sea ice nearly doubles
the entire size of Antarctica.

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To get a glimpse below
the nine-feet-thick ice,

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I climbed down a long, metal tube
inserted into the sea ice

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to witness a hidden
ecosystem full of life,

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hoping suspended between the seafloor
and the illuminated ceiling of ice.

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Here's what that looked like
from the outside.

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It was just absolutely magical.

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Some of the critters I found
were delightful things like sea shrimp

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and many more beautiful,
geometric diatoms.

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I then went farther afield
to camp out in the Dry Valleys

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for a couple of weeks.

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98 percent of Antarctica
is covered with ice

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and the Dry Valleys are the largest area
of Antarctica where you can actually see

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what the continent itself looks like
underneath all of it.

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I sampled bacteria at Blood Falls,

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a natural phenomena of a subglacial pond
spurting out iron oxide

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that was thought to be utterly lifeless
until a little more than a decade ago.

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And I hiked up a glacier
to drill down into it,

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revealing countless, hardcore critters
living their best lives

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while embedded inside layers of ice.

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Known as cryoconite holes,

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they form when tiny pieces
of darkly colored dirt

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get blown onto the glacier

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and begin to melt down into soupy holes
that then freeze over,

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preserving hundred of dirt pucks
inside the glacier,

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like little island universes,

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each with its own unique ecosystem.

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Some of the critters I found
you may recognize,

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like this adorable tardigrade --

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I absolutely love them,

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they're like little
gummy bears with claws.

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Also known as a water bear,

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they're famous for possessing super powers

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that allow them to survive
in extreme conditions,

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including the vacuum of space.

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But you don't need to travel to space
or even Antarctica to find them.

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They live in moss all over this planet,

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from sidewalk cracks to parks.

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You likely walk by tons of these
invisible animal every day.

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Others may look familiar,

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but be stranger still, like nematodes.

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Not a snake,

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nor an earth worm,

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nematodes are a creature all their own.

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They can regenerate like an earth worm
or crawl like a snake,

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but they have tiny, dagger-like needles
inside their mouths

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that some of them use to spearfish
their prey and suck out the insides.

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For every single human on this planet,

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there exist 57 billion nematodes

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And some of the critters
you may not recognize at all

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but live out equally fascinating lives,

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such as rotifers with amazing crowns
that turn into Roomba-like mouths;

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[silias] with digestive systems 
so transparent that it's almost TMI,

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and cyanobacteria that look like party
confetti exploded all over a petri dish.

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A lot of times what we see
on popular media

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are [scanning] electron microscope
images of microorganisms

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looking like scary monsters.

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Without seeing them move
their lives remain elusive to us

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despite them living nearly
everywhere we step outside.

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What's their daily life like?

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How do they interact
with their environment?

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If you only ever saw a photo
of a penguin at a zoo,

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but you never saw one waddle around
and then glide over ice,

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you wouldn't fully understand penguins.

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By seeing microcreatures in motion,

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we gain better insights into the lives
of the otherwise invisible.

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WIthout documenting the invisible life
in Antarctica and our backyards,

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we don't understand just how many
creatures we share our world with.

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And that means we don't yet
have the full picture

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of our weird and whimsical home planet.

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Thank you.