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The polar environment is a landscape so cold...

so hostile...

that nothing should survive here.

And yet...

it does.

The frozen ends of the Earth are teeming with life.

Some stories play out on an epic scale.

Others reveal just how curious

and delightful our living planet really is.

Beneath the polar ice,

scientists are discovering lifeforms

that are rewriting the rules of biology.

We are trying to find the limits of life.

Sampling the earth, the air, and the ice.

And are beginning to perceive its power

to shape our planet.

It's not a frigid sterile environment,

it's very much alive.

As scientists venture deeper into Earth's frozen realm,

the search for life on other planets

suddenly feels a lot less like science fiction.

How can we explore here on Earth

and learn more about extreme biology

and distant worlds?

At its most beautiful,

Antarctica can feel almost impossible.

A rare corner of our world.

It reawakens our idea of what a wild planet should be.

When people think of Antarctica,

I think the first thing that comes to mind

is penguins, icebergs, seals, and whales.

I was never going to be a penguin scientist.

Don't get me wrong; I do love penguins.

But there are so many other organisms

that are just as important

to the health of the environment.

For three decades,

Dr. Susanne Lockhart has been uncovering

how Antarctica's hidden ecosystems are connected

to help protect some of the most vulnerable life on Earth.

Antarctica just feels like home.

And I don't know exactly why that is

but I've just always been really connected to this place.

Every living thing here depends on the sea.

All 10,000 known species.

But most of those species

are hidden deep beneath the surface,

in a world still poorly understood

and rarely glimpsed.

Unless you can find yourself a machine

that can withstand crushing depths

and subzero temperatures.

Fortunately, we've found one!

Every summer,

Susanne commutes to work in a tiny submersible.

Her annual survey helps to identify fragile ecosystems

before they disappear.

Hoping to see a built-up community,

diverse, 3D complexity,

so that we can get it analyzed and protected.

Let's close the hatch and get down there!

Top side! Top side, 713.

713, topside, go ahead.

My hatch is closed, locked and secured.

My equalizing valve is closed.

My oxygen is on.

My CO scrubber is on, my air conditioning is on.

Both air monitors are on and in the green.

Ready to set timer on your mark.

Next stop, the sea floor.

My name is Cassie Sleeper and I'm a submersible pilot.

It's such an inhospitable world that you're going down to see.

Crazy pressure on this sub.

But fear not!

The sub is built to endure

more than a ton of force pressing on every square inch,

which is reassuring,

because we're about to test that theory.

Going down nice and gentle at about 16 meters a minute

and everything's looking good.

I've never been in a space capsule,

but I can imagine that being in the submersible

is very similar.

It's a little claustrophobic.

There's not a lot of room.

You're very aware that you're completely reliant

on the technology around you to keep you alive.

So right now, we're at 73 meters

and just before we get to the bottom,

we're gonna slow down and go nice and gentle.

Everything looks good.

I can see the bottom.

Yes, I see bottom.

There it is.

Okay, here we go. Let's go look for some things.

At first, nothing.

Just a pale expanse of silt stretching into the distance.

It's kind of spooky.

And then...

life.

These trenches here

are very much full of glass sponges.

Oh, a gorgeous delicate bryozoan there,

I love those ones.

See the little fat boy there?

- Nudibranch. - Nudibranch!

They get really big down here.

There's lots of little fish finding refuge here as well,

and that's always important.

I'm collecting evidence to make a case

for areas to be protected.

In most places on Earth,

color fades with depth.

Here, in the perpetual twilight,

it explodes.

Under the ice,

Antarctica becomes super colorful

and super diverse.

Soft corals unfurl

in sherbet pinks and burnt oranges.

Brittle stars appear like constellations.

Feather stars lift their arms,

caught mid-dance.

This is the benthos -

where life slows down and grows strange.

I think the benthic life is pretty cool.

They withstand such crushing pressure

and this cold temperature.

It is very alien.

I guess there is a kinship with astrobiology for sure.

It does feel like an alien world.

I see a sea mouse,

an aphrodite polychaete scale worm.

Oh, yeah.

They stumped me in my early years, for sure,

because the scales will come off.

And then you'll be like, "What is this organism?"

And it's really opalescent.

Octopus, octopus, octopus right there, right here.

Oh, yeah.

There's a lot of feather stars.

Oh, my goodness.

I've never... in all my years.

Oh, my God.

That's insane. Oh, my God!

He's got to be, like, a meter.

That is amazing.

I've never seen a skate before. This is really cool.

- So good. - Nice.

The appearance of larger, rarely sighted marine creatures

is a sign that this hidden world beneath the ice is not barren,

but is rich with life.

There are so many new things we find down here all the time.

There's a lot of glass sponges here.

There really are.

Sun star.

Whereas you guys like to call them death stars.

Oh, gorgeous octopus.

- Another one. - A big one. A big one.

He's right there, That's awesome.

- Aww! - He's so big.

There's certainly a lot of 3D complex structure.

Lots of organisms are using the larger organisms for shelter

and as a way to feed

and that is really what we're looking at

and the kind of areas

that we would like to get protected.

I see some more corals here, they've got some gorgeous color,

orange and yellow.

People are very surprised to hear

that there are corals in Antarctica

in such a cold environment.

They are very, very old,

they're very, very slow growing,

and that's what makes them super fragile.

The cold allows life to endure for extraordinary spans of time.

Some sponges may have been alive for more than a thousand years.

But a single disturbance to an ecosystem

can take generations to heal.

Concentrated around the Antarctic peninsula,

the krill fishing fleet

sweeps through these wild southern waters.

These industrial factory ships harvest krill around the clock.

They don't want their nets dragging along the bottom,

but unfortunately, they do.

It just makes this area so very vulnerable

and we're at the threat of losing it.

For Susanne, the goal is to ensure

these vulnerable ecosystems are protected

by steering human activity away from the sea floor.

Yeah, this is nice.

And there's an anemone over here.

A big anemone.

They may appear strange...

even slimy.

But these hidden worlds play a vital role

in supporting the entire Southern Ocean.

They help bring carbon down out of the water column

and put it back into the sediment.

It's such an important part of the whole cycle

in the Southern Ocean.

And Susanne is here to make sure

the smallest species are not forgotten.

We are going to have to go up.

It's always too short

unless a whale comes swimming by now.

I kind of feel like we might get that lucky after that dive.

It's a great dive.

Great dive.

It really is an amazing place to spend time.

I am very lucky.

Back to Earth!

Yes, I can see it getting nice and turquoise up there.

There we go.

After an hour in the deep,

next stop:

fresh air.

It's so important to protect these hidden worlds.

I'd like to think that there's still time to safeguard them.

I think that there's still a lot of hope,

and I feel the responsibility to protect it.

Thanks to Susanne's work,

more than 200 square miles of Antarctic seafloor

are now permanently off limits to commercial trawling,

protected under an international agreement

to safeguard Antarctica's fragile marine ecosystems.

It goes to show,

some of the most important pieces of our living system

are also its smallest...

and most easily overlooked.

In Antarctica's interior,

new research has uncovered a rich and complex ecosystem.

But...

it's at a scale invisible to human eyes.

And it doesn't follow the playbook

of conventional life.

Once you are in this interior region,

it's a microbially dominated world.

They're the only organisms

that are adapted to live in a place like this.

I really like microbes

because a lot of the time, they just don't make any sense.

They just live in the most extreme places

that you think "Nothing can live here."

Feels kind of like being an astronaut

when you're in the suit.

So we dress like this to reduce contaminations.

There's actually more microbial cells

than human cells in your body.

The human cells are just bigger.

Worse, we've been wearing these clothes

for about 10 days in a row.

So there's a lot of potential contamination

especially from your mouth as you breathe and speak.

This is microbial CSI -

a high-precision hunt for life too small to see.

These are essentially the world's most expensive fans.

We stick a filter on the front to capture any bacteria...

Click!

And the fans will pull air through

for four hours-- they're on a timer-

and after that, we'll extract DNA

from the filters.

But here's where things get weird.

These microbes don't eat soil

or harvest sunlight.

They survive on thin air,

literally.

Snacking on molecules in the atmosphere

is a strange trick known as "aerotrophy."

A survival strategy so extraordinary,

it's forcing scientists

to rewrite the rules of how life works.

So what I'm doing here

is measuring how quickly these bacteria in the soils

can consume the trace atmospheric gases;

hydrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide.

So we can see these bacteria in the soils

actually consuming those gases,

which is really cool that it happens

even at the freezing cold Antarctic temperatures.

So we think that aerotrophs

are actually forming the base of the food chain here.

I think it's very interesting to see how an ecosystem forms.

They're alive,

but they're alive in such a completely different dimension

to the way that humans are alive.

As we discover more

about Antarctica's strange microscopic life forms,

the more the cosmos begins to feel alive with possibility.

There's definitely a lot of interesting analogs

to extraterrestrial life in Antarctica.

Like Europa, the moon of Jupiter,

which has the ice-encrusted surface.

Yeah, Antarctica is a very interesting place

to study astrobiology:

what life might be like on other planets.

When astrobiologists imagine life beyond Earth,

they're not picturing something waving back at us.

They're looking for the quiet survivors

thriving in hidden places...

just like this one.

High in the Tyrolean Alps lies a secret world.

Discovered by accident in 2007,

when a mountaineer peered into a small crack in the glacier

and found a labyrinth of frozen chambers

buried within its glittering heart.

A palace of ice,

with vaulted halls,

dripping with frozen chandeliers,

like the ruins of some lost Arctic Versailles.

The ice is like a massive treasure box.

It tells us a lot about the climate,

but it's also a treasure box of a whole lot of biodiversity.

So it harbors life in all different kinds.

For ecologist Birgit Sattler,

this frozen underworld reveals a hidden menagerie

of ice creatures most of us never knew existed.

Ice is never sterile.

Nobody would have thought

that little tiny animals and organisms,

they can live inside the ice.

But here we are!

There are bacteria, there are algae,

there are fungi.

There are also some metazoans,

like tardigrades or the glacial flea.

We just see ice now as a solid block,

but it's just a mingling of ice crystals.

And inside these tiny channels, they can move around.

Ice is also not just like distilled water.

They also have nutrients and salts.

Inside the ice,

the mini-ecosystem is surprisingly busy--

eating, reproducing,

and quietly shaping the chemistry of the snow.

The type of microorganisms living in this ice

have existed for millions of years.

Like nature's closest thing to an unbreakable toy,

tardigrades are able to live for decades

without food or water,

tolerate temperatures hotter than a kitchen oven,

and even survive the frozen vacuum of space!

With creatures like this living in the ice,

it's easy to see why scientists believe

our icy worlds are a window into space.

Life in ice is like a holy grail, also,

when you think about astrobiology.

How could it be on other exoplanets,

which are ice covered?

I would be quite positive that if there is life,

that it would be in ice.

These tiny ecosystems may appear trivial,

but as ice melts

the microbial biomass gets carried downstream

into rivers and soils,

seeding entire ecosystems,

feeding aquatic life,

and fertilizing landscapes far below,

rippling all the way down the mountain-

through streams, forests, and beyond.

Recognizing how important these hidden ecosystems are,

Birgit spends the year tracking the tiny lifeforms

within the snow and ice.

Snow and ice is an ecosystem itself,

and a healthy glacier has a healthy microbial ecosystem

so that's the base of any ecosystem.

But the environment here

is going through dramatic change.

Many glaciers in this Austrian area,

they will be lost within--

the small ones within some years even,

and we have even witnessed some glaciers vanish.

In an effort to preserve Alpine glaciers,

each spring, miles of fabric is rolled out

across swathes of snow.

It's a striking and somewhat surreal scene,

known as "blanket tucking"--

as glaciers are put to bed for the summer.

So the best sunscreen for a glacier

would be a perfect white snow cover.

But this will go away,

so they have to do it in a technical way.

They lay out fleeces.

It's a lot of work.

It takes them weeks.

The idea is simple:

wrap it in a giant reflective blanket

to deflect the summer sun.

And it appears to work.

What once seemed like a quirky experiment

has been adopted across the European Alps--

from Austria and Switzerland,

to Italy and France--

buying some glaciers years of extra life.

But how far are we willing to go to hold onto ice?

The blankets that they're using,

it's made of polypropylene,

and that's an emission source of microplastics,

and we can't have it in such a sensitive ecosystem

as high-altitude regions.

This here looks pretty clean.

Birgit is investigating a new eco-friendly material

being trialed here at Hintertux.

This is made of cellulose.

It's a pure natural fiber.

It is made of wood,

and cellulose has more or less the same performance

as the plastic fleece.

0.4.

- Maybe from the surface. - Yeah.

Every two weeks, we go to our test fields.

We look for the biodiversity inside of snow and ice.

Is there a change? Is there a shift?

And at the end,

we hope that we can give green light for these samples.

Blanket tucking won't stop climate change.

But on a small scale, it will buy time

for some of the Alps' most iconic glaciers.

And for the delicate ecosystems that have evolved here.

Ice has taught me a lot

to be humble in my own existence,

in my own awareness of nature.

It's really a privilege to work here.

That's why we cry out

that it must be protected.

The secret life inside snow and ice

may be impossible for our eyes to see,

but it is crucial to the health of these mountain environments.

And like any ecosystem, when the balance is disturbed,

it will change the world around it.

Oskar Uniform,

can you open a 7-nautical-mile working area around my position

and next corner later than 01345?

For the past few years, Professor Alun Hubbard

has been investigating a strange phenomenon,

as something living wakes within the Greenland ice sheet.

The ice sheet is meant to be white.

But this part of the Greenland ice sheet,

it's gone really, really dark.

And we call it the dark zone.

It does sound a bit Star Wars-y.

And we used to just think it was dust or black carbon

coming in from wildfires from North America,

but it turns out it's its own unique ecosystem.

The Greenland ice sheet,

it's not a frigid sterile environment,

it's very much alive

with this weird ecosystem of cryoconite.

It's like ground coffee grains.

It's really weird stuff.

It's organic, it's algae,

there's some fungi in there as well.

And they're basically living off dust on ice.

I mean, how crazy is that?

Bathed in summer's 24-hour sunlight,

algae produce dark pigments to shield themselves.

But that same pigment sets off a chain reaction.

Viewers with trypophobia may wish to look away now.

It's literally drilling holes into the ice sheet

because dark surfaces absorb a hell of a lot more radiation

than bright white surfaces.

And every year,

the living dark zone creeps further.

What's for sure is there's a lot of it,

certainly on this western margin of the ice sheet.

It's a vast area, 1,000 kilometers in length,

60, 100 kilometers wide,

and it's having a huge impact on the melt rates here.

In just one summer, it's estimated algae

melted an extra four to six gigatons of ice,

about ten percent of all the melt in the region.

It's expanding because the ice that's melting

carries this mineral dust from the last Ice Age.

We have a nutrient source,

we have 24-hour sunlight, and we have water,

and it's like a nutty hydroponic experiment.

At the height of summer,

thousands of meltwater lakes

materialize across Greenland's ice sheet.

If we land on this eastern shore of it, Tina,

that would be fantastic.

So, kind of just below us.

Okay.

This is what we call a supraglacial lake.

It's basically a surface melt lake.

There's some really, really big black patches

of cryoconite, algae crud,

it's really accumulated in the bottom of this lake.

I want to see if it's decomposing

and letting off any methane.

So we're going to be running the sensor

and taking some real-time measurements as we go.

What could go wrong, eh?

Well, actually,

this entire lake could suddenly collapse

and drain into the ice below.

Literally a huge fracture opens up

and the water gets swallowed in.

And that is very dramatic.

and lakes five, six kilometers across

disappear down this hole.

So Alun is keeping a fairly close eye on things,

just in case the lake decides to disappear.

Iceberg-ahoy!

Oh, it's gorgeous.

From a certain aspect,

you'd think it's like the Caribbean.

But it's cold.

I'm not going to last very long in there.

That water is about one degree or less.

Bubbles trapped under the ice

give Alun the first clue...

that something is feeding on the dead.

We've got a really funky natural experiment here.

My suspicion is those bubbles will have

quite a high concentration of methane in them.

So that's what I'm gonna have a look, see, and do.

Try and deploy this instrument scientifically.

You never know unless you make the measurement.

As algae dies beneath the ice,

microbes move in to consume the rotting remains

and exhale methane into the atmosphere.

Methane is a very, very potent greenhouse gas.

It's 20, 30 times more potent a greenhouse gas

than CO2, carbon dioxide.

It's the kind of untold story of climate change.

There are satellites now

that are detecting methane across the planet

and the indication is there are parts of Greenland

where there's a lot of methane being released.

We just don't know where it's coming from

and whether it's a specific source

or whether it's, like, the whole ice sheet.

Holding enough water

to raise global sea level by 23 feet,

the ice sheet faces a feedback loop in overdrive.

More melt means more algae, leading to more methane,

accelerating the warming of the atmosphere.

Ambient methane levels,

they're about one to two parts per million.

I was getting a reading of up to 500 parts per million.

These extraordinary readings suggest

that parts of the ice sheet

may now be acting like a giant bioreactor.

The point about being here

is that you see these new processes emerging.

And I think that's quite important

if we're to try and predict its future

and figure out what's going to happen to this ice sheet

over the next 50, 100, 200 years.

But this story doesn't end here in Greenland.

Not so long ago,

this Alaskan swamp land was ice too.

When the ice retreated, it left behind a frozen legacy:

permafrost,

ground that has stayed frozen for thousands of years.

And now, as the planet warms, lakes form,

not on the ice this time,

but where the earth begins to thaw and collapse.

You'd think of Arctic field work as cold,

but now it's the hottest summer on record in Alaska,

in the same year where we have

the hottest sea surface temperatures

and the most melt in Greenland.

I've been coming here for about four years now,

on and off.

If a bear shows up, my gear isn't worth my life.

In grizzly country,

every strange noise tends to get your attention.

Particularly when you're not at the top of the food chain.

The porcupine has solved the predator problem

with a rather prickly survival suit.

But it's not the only thing making a living here.

Under the squelching mud, a hidden biology stirs to life.

Microbes feed and belch,

turning long-frozen landscapes into sources of gas.

Big Trail Lake is iconic

because it is the highest known emitter of natural methane

we've yet found on this planet.

And it's like a hot tub:

the equivalent of nature farting in a bath.

Nature is much less embarrassed about this one,

and as you'll see, this lake pursues it freely.

Big Trail Lake is a laboratory of the Arctic.

It's a projection

of what the Arctic could look like in the future.

It may be a worst-case scenario,

but we need to know what it looks like

because these types of abrupt permafrost thaw areas

are starting to emerge elsewhere.

For the past four years,

Kevin has been trying to answer a critical question:

How are these gases escaping?

And how much is being released?

All around this lake in the water

are plants that have developed an interesting strategy

in order to get oxygen and other gases

down to its roots and back.

They've created these little straw-like structures

that go from the outside all the way down to the soil.

The plant didn't intend this,

but it's inadvertently created a superhighway

for the gases that are produced in the roots

to come back up.

And what that does

is it releases those gaseous products--

carbon dioxide and methane--

out from all of the plants

that are encircling Big Trail Lake.

Despite the lake's lush appearance,

the vegetation growing here simply can't keep pace

with the speed and volume of the emissions being released.

To find out just how much is escaping into the atmosphere,

Kevin samples the invisible gas using telescopic tubes.

The evidence is then carried back for analysis.

The flasks have had about 35 minutes

to move into this instrument.

And the results are interesting and match our expectations.

There are some that are elevated

something that's slightly above what I would call ambient

or something that what methane would look like

maybe in our backyards.

But in the places closer to the lake

where we've taken samples,

it's massively elevated.

Many times higher than ambient.

I'm used to just grabbing air

and knowing that I have a machine that'll measure it,

but I can't see the change.

And now, when I look out across this environment,

I can see change quite clearly in front of me.

The way that these trees are generally described

is "a drunken forest."

Trees that are leaning over as a consequence of thaw

that's happening to the permafrost

underneath the soil below us.

As a scientist,

it's often really hard to observe small changes

when the scale is tipping,

it's really difficult.

But when I'm walking through these environments

and I'm looking out on these ecosystems and landscapes,

the scale isn't tipping, it's screaming at me.

The effects of the changing environment

are very tangible.

Every one of these trees represents an incremental step

towards a future that could represent a shifting climate

that will affect all of us uniquely,

but in general, much warmer.

Across our world,

wherever ice has shaped the landscape,

change is underway.

From space, Earth hangs as a fragile blue marble.

We now see life,

in all its resilience and strangeness,

is not confined to warm, sunlit places.

Sometimes, life begins in the cold stillness of ice,

which raises an extraordinary possibility.

If ice can incubate life here on Earth,

could it do the same elsewhere in the cosmos?

And here we go.

Ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five,

four, three, two, one,

ignition!

And lift off!

Lift off, the falcon heavy with Europa Clipper.

Unveiling the mysteries of an enormous ocean

lurking beneath the icy crust of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

Engine pressures are nominal.

Across the solar system, wherever we search for life,

we search for ice.

Europa Clipper, separation confirmed.

Ice exists in the shadows of distant moons,

at the poles of Mars,

and forms the frozen shell of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

Because ice holds more than water,

it holds chemistry, possibility.

In 2024,

NASA's Europa Clipper began a five-and-a-half-year journey

across the solar system to the ice moon of Europa.

The mission: the search for life!

Beneath Europa's frozen crust,

an immense liquid ocean may exist,

providing one of the most promising places

in our solar system

for life beyond Earth.

If we want to explore alien ice worlds,

we first have to engineer for them.

Which is why scientists

are turning to our own polar regions

where we can begin testing the technologies,

and the ideas that may one day take us to new frontiers.

The huge floe lies north, north east.

We follow the open lead lies alongside this big flow,

almost to the end to the north

and then we will go to the east.

It's early spring,

and the icebreaker, Le Commandant Charcot,

navigates through sea ice

as it pushes towards the coastal fjords of Greenland.

Onboard are both passengers and scientists.

We are heading to Ittoqqortoormiit.

And I'm really curious to see the place.

The sound has been frozen over all winter.

It's covered with ice.

So it's an environment that's been sealed off and isolated.

Because this ship has the capability

of a really powerful icebreaker,

we are able to get into areas where other scientists can't

and certainly not at this time of year.

So we're able to conduct investigations

that other folks generally aren't able to do.

Reversing toward the shore,

the icebreaker uses the thrust of its propellers

to carve a narrow lead through the frozen surface.

It's important, then, you know, the limits of your vessel.

The most dangerous part when we sail into this area

is to be trapped in the ice.

As the Inuit say,

only the weather and the ice will decide.

Clinging to the edge of East Greenland,

Ittoqqortoormiit is one of the most isolated settlements

on Earth,

accessible by ship only for a few short months each year.

Coming into this village in this way

has been a really unique experience for me.

I've never experienced Greenland

or any other polar region from the sea.

Robotics designer Vickie Siegel

builds autonomous vehicles that dive beneath sea ice,

exploring oceans like those that may exist

on icy worlds beyond Earth.

It's so much wetter from this morning.

Okay, it's safe.

So I've been working with a robotics team

that's developing systems

to someday explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Now of course,

when we're talking about ice on other worlds,

off of Earth,

largely, we have to kind of speculate.

But we can give our best guess by investigating

as many different under-ice environments here on Earth

as we can possibly reach.

The local Greenlandic people

go ice fishing here all the time.

But there hasn't been a lot of scientific work

just kind of looking at the ice-water interface

in this area.

I think it'll be a great place to send the ROV down for a dive.

You feel comfortable?

Ah, yeah, that's better.

Vickie is fitted with a survival suit

and tethered to a safety line,

just in case she slips into the subzero sea.

Okay. Pull on it to see.

I really do not want to fall into this water.

This is really cold!

We will not break you in pieces.

It's good.

This little robot is a lot simpler

than what I'm used to working with,

but I think it's a really good tool

to just kind of do some first look science

under the ice here.

The more times we can look under the ice,

and see what the underside looks like,

see what the environment is like,

the better we understand the constraints

that we have to engineer towards.

So the nice thing about the VR goggles

is if I look to the right,

it makes the robot turn to the right,

and if I look left, it looks left.

If I look up,

then I can see the underside of the ice right now.

And if I look down, I see the briny deep.

Ice is ever changing.

It's an amazing medium

to make a robot navigate through, navigate in.

Are we safe on the current point of view?

It's not too strong.

No, I think it's alright.

I think I'm close underneath the open channel,

but there's a jellyfish,

so I'm taking a moment to check him out.

Oh, it's beautiful.

Oh, that's interesting, okay.

The sediment in the ice is a challenge

when you're looking at drilling

through long, long stretches of ice.

It does have interesting implications

for robotics, actually.

Being under the ice takes me off of this planet.

It makes me think about

how we might explore other worlds with oceans

and what that might look like.

As Europa Clipper is doing these flybys of Europa,

there's a lot to think about.

The orbiting spacecraft won't land.

It will skim the surface, mapping the icy crust.

So that one day, we know exactly where to touch down.

There are several robotic challenges

that we have to tackle

to conduct an exploration mission.

First is that we have to be able to drill through

somewhere between 14 and 40 kilometers of ice.

Kilometers of ice!

That's a lot.

And then once you've broken through the ice into the ocean,

well, you've got an entire ocean to explore.

That's something that we're still working on

on this planet.

Polar landscapes are not just helping us

imagine other worlds.

They are changing how we see our own,

revealing just how precious, complex,

and vulnerable life on Earth really is.

There is still so much that we don't know.

And just by going out and being in these environments

and looking with a little bit of a different perspective,

we learn more about climate change,

we learn more about extreme biology here on Earth.

But that all begins on the edges of human exploration.

The more we learn about Earth's polar extremes,

the more it becomes clear:

they hold the key to our future

and shape the world we live in.

The ice here is something

that really needs to be treated like the Amazon rainforest

or any of these really important ecosystems

that are lifeblood for the planet.

There's this feeling that we need to be doing better,

faster, and sooner.

It's our collective responsibility.

We are all responsible for Antarctica

and the Southern Ocean because it's owned by no one.

I see how fragile it is

but I also see how connected it is.

It's just super important

for the balance of the natural world.

Moved by what these places give us,

a determined effort is taking shape

to keep something irreplaceable from slipping away.

Here in the Arctic, we've got an opportunity

to get it right, to have it remain as it is

and not have it become an industrialized place.

We can do it!

ULYANA PEÑA: This is what's at stake.

This needs to exist on this planet.

Understanding the extraordinary role ice plays

in shaping our planet

is the first step toward protecting it.

We're laying the groundwork for incredible research

that will continue beyond our lifetimes.