Original subtitles

♪♪

narrator: The frozen body of a legendary climber

found on mount everest.

Rose: He didn't pass out.

The rope around his waist was severed.

Something else happened to him.

Bellinger: When he fell, was he on his way up

or on his way back down?

The answer to that question could be monumental.

Narrator: A strange building in the middle of the ice cap

lies deserted.

O'keefe: Food lays on the shelves.

Full beer bottles line the bar.

Magazines sit open on the tables.

Macferrin: It really makes you wonder, why did the people who were here

have to leave this building so quickly?

Narrator: And a zombie virus comes back from its icy grave.

Irving: So with a discovery like this,

your mind immediately goes to the worst-case scenario.

It begs the question, what else might be out there

that we don't know about?

♪♪

narrator: These are the strangest mysteries,

trapped in the coldest places.

Lost relics,

forgotten treasures,

dark secrets,

locked in their icy tombs for ages.

But now as ice melts around the world,

their stories will finally be exposed.

-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by discovery communications

[ wind whistling ]

♪♪

over 26,000 feet above sea level,

a shocking discovery might mean rewriting the history books.

Rose: It's the top of the world, freezing cold,

and utterly breathtaking.

Narrator: Lying between nepal and tibet,

mount everest attracts roughly 800 climbers every year

hoping to conquer the peak.

Rose: With temperatures that can drop to minus-76 degrees fahrenheit,

a thin atmosphere, avalanches,

and the risk of falling to your death around every corner...

♪♪

...Why would any sane person want to climb that?

♪♪

around 2,000 feet from the summit, expert climbers

come across a startling discovery...

♪♪

...A mummified corpse.

You've climbed as far away from human civilization

as you possibly can, and you look over and see a body.

♪♪

narrator: Upon closer inspection,

the body is equipped with climbing gear

from what looks like the 1920s.

There's no nylon ropes, no thermal materials.

This guy was dressed in wool, cotton, and silk.

Narrator: It leaves little doubt this body is very old.

Could these be the long-lost remains

of the infamous mountaineer george mallory?

That's the right era for the mallory-irvine expedition.

But a lot of people have died on everest.

Bodies have been found all over the mountain.

♪♪

narrator: Englishman george mallory was one of the very first climbers

to attempt to summit mount everest in 1921.

♪♪

he tried three times in two years,

but with no success.

But his tenacity captured the media's imagination.

He was once asked what made him want to climb everest,

to which he uttered the three most famous words

in mountaineering, "because it's there."

♪♪

on June 8, 1924,

mallory set out from their final camp

on his fourth and final summit attempt

with his climbing partner, andrew irvine.

Rose: The pair were last seen 800 feet below the peak.

And after that...

They were never seen again.

♪♪

narrator: Speculation about what happened to him

has plagued the climbing world ever since.

Could his remains have finally surfaced after all these years?

♪♪

expedition members examine the body looking for clues

due to the cold, thin atmosphere, it's well preserved.

He's lying face-down, and they note

that he still has his climbing rope around his waist.

♪♪

then they find the smoking gun they've been looking for.

Inside the preserved clothes of the mysterious climber,

they find a label, and it reads...

George mallory.

It's definitive.

It took 75 years to find mallory's remains.

And they were found so close to the top of the mountain.

♪♪

what exactly happened to george mallory?

♪♪

the answer to that question could be monumental.

♪♪

narrator: There's a name for the highest part of everest --

the death zone.

♪♪

up here, oxygen is so limited,

your body's cells start to die.

♪♪

judgment becomes impaired.

♪♪

you can experience severe altitude sickness,

strokes, or even heart attacks.

Did mallory die from lack of oxygen

before reaching the top of the mountain?

♪♪

billson: Mallory was an expert climber

and was on the very first british expedition

to the mountain in 1921.

♪♪

he was well aware of the risks at that high altitude.

♪♪

narrator: But even experienced climbers can succumb

to the tallest mountain in the world.

♪♪

avalanches are frequent on everest.

Could mallory have been caught in a fatal slide?

♪♪

most victims of avalanches survive the slide,

but die of suffocation.

They are literally buried alive.

But even under the mass of snow in the dark,

struggling to stay conscious, you dig, thrash,

fight, flail, anything to get free.

Mallory was lying flat, face-down,

almost calm.

There is no sign of struggle, digging, or asphyxiation.

This wasn't an avalanche.

♪♪

narrator: Altitude can cause another risk

beyond lack of oxygen and the cold.

We're talking about mountain climbing here.

Falling is clearly a very common way to die.

♪♪

narrator: Mallory and irvine would have been tied together

by a rope around the waist as a safety measure.

That way, if one falls, the other will catch him.

♪♪

mallory's body does show a serious rope-jerk injury

around the waist, and his leg was fractured,

both indications of a fall.

♪♪

but one thing just doesn't add up --

an odd puncture wound on mallory's forehead.

♪♪

it's very unlikely that a wound like that

was caused by a rock or a fall.

Narrator: So what caused this wound?

Rose: The wound looks like it could have been caused

by the head of an ice ax.

So, if a climber's falling,

they could use their ice ax to slow the descent.

But if they hit a rock, it would deflect back

and then, whack, hit him right in the head.

Mallory's ice ax was never found,

but his climbing partner's was.

Irvine's ice ax was found farther up

than mallory's body...

♪♪

...Implying the two men could have been even higher

when they fell.

♪♪

when he fell, was he on his way up

or on his way back down?

Narrator: If researchers can answer this question,

it could settle a controversy

that has dominated the climbing world for almost a century.

In 1953, 29 years after george mallory went missing,

another pair of climbers were officially credited

with being the first to summit everest --

sir edmund hillary, and his sherpa, tenzing norgay.

♪♪

could it be that mallory made it to the top

almost three decades before hillary?

♪♪

bellinger: We might have to rewrite the history books

on who conquered everest first.

♪♪

narrator: Expedition members are searching for evidence

that may prove george mallory was the first person

to summit everest and not sir edmund hillary.

♪♪

the team turns to mallory's family members

for more information,

and they immediately reveal another clue.

Billson: According to mallory's daughter,

her father always carried a picture of his wife,

which he intended to leave at the top of everest

after he'd reached the summit.

Rose: The body was in pristine condition.

He even had his wallet with a letter and a receipt

from a climbing outfitter, but no photo.

♪♪

bellinger: Where's the photo?

Was george mallory true to his word?

Did he leave the photo of his wife at the top of everest?

♪♪

narrator: They don't find the photo, but during the search,

someone notices something very odd.

Mallory wasn't wearing his goggles,

and they weren't around his neck.

Narrator: No climber would ever attempt to summit mount everest

without goggles,

even back in 1924.

Sun glaring off the snow and ice can cause snow blindness,

which can be lethal at this altitude.

Just days before mallory made his ascent,

another climber was blinded

because he wasn't wearing goggles.

There is no way that mallory would have been ascending

without wearing his goggles.

♪♪

narrator: After a thorough search,

the team eventually find his goggles

buried deep in one of his pockets.

Why wasn't he wearing them?

♪♪

rose: The most convincing reason is if it was after dark

and he was already on his way back down the mountain.

Bellinger: But if he was coming down,

then coming down from where?

Did mallory make it all the way to the top,

or did he turn back just a few hundred feet before his goal?

Narrator: Mallory left on his expedition with a camera in his kit.

If the camera can be located,

it could provide evidence to settle the question

of whether he made it to the top once and for all.

You wouldn't carry a camera all that way

and not take a photo on top of the mountain.

Billson: With the temperature up there always below zero,

there's a really strong chance to film inside the camera

would be preserved, as well.

Rose: If we could only develop that last roll of film,

maybe we could see if mallory reached the top.

Photographic evidence would be definitive proof.

But where is that camera?

♪♪

bellinger: His body was undisturbed.

He had his wallet. He had his altimeter.

He had his goggles.

The camera must be out there.

We just haven't found it.

Narrator: Without it, there's no way to know for sure

if mallory made it to the top.

♪♪

wolf: If mallory didn't make it to the top,

he was at least close enough to see it.

Either way, it's an astounding accomplishment.

Narrator: Lost somewhere just below the peak

of the highest mountain on the planet

lies a camera that could contain a photograph

that could rewrite history.

But that secret still remains buried somewhere in the ice.

♪♪

♪♪

in the uninhabited subzero environment of greenland,

rising out of the ice and snow,

an unusual building lays abandoned.

Somara: This is a really strange structure.

It's all made of steel.

It has a giant sphere on top

and similar round features on its sides.

♪♪

macferrin: To see this huge building

sticking out in the middle of a vast white ice sheet,

it really reminds you

of a supervillain base from a james bond movie.

Inside is even stranger.

Food lays on the shelves.

Full beer bottles line the bar.

♪♪

magazines sit open on the tables as if they were being read.

The place was abandoned so fast

that they left eggs on the counter.

People didn't just leave this place. They fled.

♪♪

it really makes you wonder, why did the people who were here

have to leave this building so quickly?

Narrator: This is a dew line station, short for distant early warning,

one of a series of far north radar stations.

♪♪

during the cold war, threat of nuclear retaliation

maintained an uneasy balance between the usa and ussr.

♪♪

both countries feared

that the other would launch their nuclear missiles first,

wiping out their defenses.

♪♪

the dew line was america's attempt

to thwart a first nuclear strike

which would have been delivered by russian bombers.

♪♪

macferrin: The main purpose of the station was to monitor

for incoming aircraft or missiles

that might come over the poles from russia.

♪♪

they also listened for radio transmissions

that they might be able to intercept from the enemy.

♪♪

narrator: The dew line consisted of more than 60 radar stations

stretching across the top part of the north american continent,

from alaska to greenland,

some of them fully manned with military personnel,

ready to respond at a moment's notice.

♪♪

so what could have happened here that would have caused

these soldiers to flee before even finishing their meals?

♪♪

for the most part, the structure is in great shape.

If you've got the power up and running,

and some heat in there,

you could easily move back into the base.

♪♪

narrator: There is one room that appears to have been breached,

filling the corridor with snow.

Billson: That's strange.

This building was built by the military and built to last.

Maybe the building did suffer some damage.

♪♪

narrator: Could the building and its crew have sustained

some sort of secret military strike?

♪♪

in 1981, russia became increasingly convinced

of an imminent attack from the united states.

In response, the chairman of the kgb, yuri andropov,

and general secretary of the soviet union leonid brezhnev

launched the largest-ever soviet intelligence-gathering campaign.

It was called operation ryan.

It was an acronym which, when translated from russian,

literally meant "nuclear missile attack."

♪♪

o'keefe: You know, for any soviet strike to be successful,

they would have to find a way to avoid

or, better yet, remove the early warning system.

♪♪

narrator: And isolated dew station in a remote part of greenland

would have been a perfect target.

♪♪

was this station a victim of soviet espionage?

♪♪

narrator: A united states military radar station

in the far north of greenland

is found mysteriously and suddenly abandoned.

♪♪

there aren't many reasons

that armed forces evacuate a building so quickly.

♪♪

could they have fled to soviet attack?

There are no signs of explosions or weapons damage

to the outside of the building.

Macferrin: There's no gaping holes in the roof,

but there are some doors that are left cracked open

and some windows that have broken.

Any gap in the building over 30 years

will let the snow right in.

Also, there are no shell casings anywhere.

These men would have been well trained military personnel,

but they fled without firing a shot.

♪♪

narrator: None of the evidence points to a physical attack.

Some wonder if the base could have been decimated

by something less calculated but just as deadly.

♪♪

wolf: So if it wasn't a manmade disaster,

then maybe a natural disaster hit the base.

♪♪

somara: This station was built to withstand

the extreme weather of greenland.

It's a steel structure,

and it's still standing after decades abandoned.

Narrator: The answer may lie in the design

of the building itself.

Engineers built the station on eight steel beams

for a very specific reason.

In this part of the greenland ice sheet,

snow builds up year after year after year.

And anything you leave on the surface

is going to get buried over time.

So to keep this above the surface,

they kept having to jack it up on these enormous stilts

time and time again.

♪♪

narrator: Between 1959 and 1983,

engineers raised the station 104 feet in total.

♪♪

but each time they jacked it up,

they made it slightly less stable.

Macferrin: So these enormous "I" beams that the building sits upon

are sunk into the snow. And snow settles over the time,

and it doesn't necessarily settle evenly.

♪♪

narrator: But the "I" beams alone

weren't responsible for the abandonment of the base.

It was the combination of a second design flaw

that sealed the dew line station's fate.

Macferrin: So, when they designed the building,

they put this enormous snow melting furnace

in a corner of it in order to melt snow

for drinking water and showers for all the men.

♪♪

what they didn't anticipate is that the heat from this

would dissipate into the "I" beams

and cause that corner of the building

to settle faster than the others over time.

♪♪

somara: The weight and the heat of the building

have pushed the foundation to the edge of failure.

It could collapse at any moment.

The station had become a deathtrap.

Billson: The building was not under attack from a military force,

but from the very ice it was built on.

♪♪

narrator: When military engineers realized this,

they ordered an immediate evacuation.

[ siren wailing ]

♪♪

afterwards, they even tried to re-level it.

But all efforts failed.

The base was lost.

♪♪

with advances in radar technology, satellites,

and icbms, early warning stations

became a thing of the past.

Narrator: Now the giant icy monolith sits frozen,

a relic of the cold war,

abandoned to the ice.

♪♪

♪♪

about 100 miles from the east coast of scotland

lies one of the ocean's strangest mysteries.

A controversial new theory

involving ancient ice age formations

may offer an unexpected answer.

♪♪

rose: When you look at it, you just scratch your head, thinking,

"how could this possibly have happened?"

♪♪

narrator: On the bottom of the ocean,

a fishing trawler rests completely undamaged.

♪♪

rose: What causes a ship in perfect condition

with no evidence of damage

to end up at the bottom of the ocean?

♪♪

narrator: Stranger still, it's sitting in the middle of a crater

more than 300 feet in diameter.

♪♪

fishermen call this area the witch's ground

because the bottom is so rough, it eats up their gear.

♪♪

but the fishing is so good,

many crews take their chances anyway.

♪♪

irving: On the seabed in the witch's ground

is a crater they call the witch's hole.

♪♪

narrator: The crater measures 328 feet across.

And the boat is sitting dead center.

There's something odd about the way it's resting.

Somara: The trawler is perfectly intact.

It's resting delicately on its keel,

as if someone placed it there.

If the ship hit a rock or some other object,

that would sink it.

But the trawler has no signs of damage.

The hull is in perfect shape.

♪♪

narrator: If it's unlikely a leak took this ship down,

could it have been swamped by a rogue wave?

♪♪

narrator: What appears to be a seaworthy fishing trawler

found at the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a crater

raises questions about how it got there.

♪♪

did a natural disaster at sea take it down?

♪♪

irving: Severe weather, intense winds,

big waves --

any of these things could knock over a ship.

♪♪

if a vessel was hit broadside by a large wave or swell,

it could roll.

♪♪

in extreme cases,

really big waves could pitchpole a vessel.

♪♪

♪♪

narrator: But when investigators examine the wreck,

they realize it's improbable

that a violent storm sank this ship.

All the fishing gear is laid out

like the ship is ready to go to work.

It's eerily calm.

When a ship capsizes, most often you'd see damage on the deck,

but on this trawler, you see no sign of that.

♪♪

what on earth caused this ship to sink?

♪♪

it's like some unseen hand reached up from the depths

and pulled the ship to the bottom

right in the middle of the crater.

♪♪

narrator: Perhaps the clue to this mystery

lies in the crater itself.

Hundreds of miles away in the icy waters of the barents sea,

investigators discover a slew of craters

just like the one that contains the trawler.

♪♪

macferrin: When they surveyed the floor of the barents sea,

they found this enormous network of craters,

some of them up to 1/2 mile wide and 100 feet deep

covering the ocean floor.

♪♪

narrator: What powerful force caused these craters?

♪♪

the answer could hold the key to unlocking the mystery

behind the sunken fishing trawler.

♪♪

could the craters have been caused by asteroids?

♪♪

irving: These don't look like asteroid strikes.

There are very few impact craters

that have been discovered in the ocean

because the sea floor changes so rapidly.

These ones are too small, too new,

and there are too many of them.

Rose: Plus, an asteroid or anything coming from above

would destroy a ship on the surface,

not place it gently on the bottom.

Asteroids certainly don't help us with this mystery.

♪♪

irving: So if these craters were not caused by something from above,

maybe something from below.

Narrator: It's a controversial theory,

but some wonder if they were caused

by underwater gas-filled pingos.

Macferrin: A pingo is formed from pressure underneath the earth,

either from ice that's shifting together

or from bubbles forming under the surface

that raises the ground around it.

♪♪

narrator: They are essentially big domes of methane gas

trapped under the sea floor.

And they're like a ticking time bomb.

♪♪

somara: After years of withstanding pressure,

these pingos eventually pop, forming craters 1/2 mile across.

♪♪

rose: Imagine this would have been like

the earth making a massive burp.

♪♪

somara: Could a sudden release of methane gas from the seabed

sink a ship on the surface above?

♪♪

narrator: Deep within the waters of the north sea

lies a fishing trawler in the middle of a crater.

♪♪

investigators wonder if a sudden violent eruption of methane gas

was behind its mysterious sinking.

♪♪

it's not the first time methane has caused disasters at sea.

♪♪

there's even a case of a drill ship

becoming destabilized because of methane.

♪♪

a ruptured methane pocket sent an immense amount of gas

violently bubbling to the surface.

It almost sank the entire rig.

♪♪

narrator: Did the fishing trawler in the north sea

fall victim to the same fate?

Could gas bubbles really have taken down an entire ship?

♪♪

methane gas bubbling up from the seabed

reduces the density of water.

♪♪

the theory is, without enough density to hold up the vessel,

ships caught in the area would no longer be able to float.

♪♪

the methane gas goes up, and the ship

in perfect condition sinks to the bottom.

♪♪

irving: As strange as it seems, a methane release

could be a plausible explanation

for what we see in the witch's hole.

A small vessel like that trawler

could have been overwhelmed much more easily.

♪♪

the crew onboard could have been completely caught off-guard

and would have had no time to react.

♪♪

this is only one theory. There are plenty of other things

that could have happened to the boat,

but it's certainly the most intriguing.

♪♪

narrator: It's true.

The boat may have sunk for any number of reasons,

and it might be pure coincidence

that it landed perfectly in the middle of the crater.

But it is possible that by astronomical chance,

the trawler may have found itself directly above

a sudden release of gas.

And the freak accident caused the ship to sink gently down

into the middle of the crater directly below it.

♪♪

♪♪

in the farthest reaches of northern siberia,

a team of russian and french scientists

make a chilling discovery.

♪♪

deep in the frozen ground,

they find a 30,000-year-old virus

lying in a state of dormancy.

You look at it, and you think, how could anything survive

in frozen ground for this long?

♪♪

poinar: It begs the question,

what else might be out there that we don't know about?

Narrator: The ancient strain is called mollivirus sibericum,

or giant virus,

because it's 1,000 times as big as a normal one.

Irving: So, with a discovery like this,

your mind immediately goes to the worst-case scenario.

What if an ancient human pathogen like a virus

or a bacterium thaws out and wakes up?

Narrator: And if it does, can it harm us?

Poinar: When a virus infects the body and under the right conditions,

viruses will multiply.

That's basically how we become sick.

They overwhelm our body's defense mechanisms,

and they're especially dangerous

to populations who've never been exposed to them before.

♪♪

narrator: When smallpox first arrived in the americas,

it annihilated indigenous populations

because they had almost no immunity against the virus.

The pain and suffering it caused was indescribable.

Entire communities were completely destroyed.

♪♪

it's for this reason

that scientists need to test whether it's possible

to reactivate the dormant mollivirus.

If they can, does that mean other ancient zombie viruses

could wake up and wipe us all out?

♪♪

narrator: A 30,000-year-old giant virus strain

is found in the frozen ground of russian siberia.

♪♪

scientists want to see if they can bring it back to life.

Some worry that if they're successful,

we might all be in trouble.

It's not inconceivable that you could

bring something like this back to life.

There are pathogens that have been frozen

and come back to life.

♪♪

narrator: In 2016, in russia's yamal peninsula,

an unprecedented heat wave

rapidly thawed the frozen tundra.

All of a sudden,

wild animals started dying in massive numbers.

♪♪

irving: In a short space of time,

more than 2,000 reindeer drop dead.

♪♪

narrator: Locals from the area were understandably concerned.

But when the people themselves started getting sick,

concern turned to terror.

♪♪

this went undiagnosed for several weeks

until a 12-year-old boy died, and people began to panic.

♪♪

narrator: The cause of the deadly illness

was eventually traced to a strain of anthrax

that had lain dormant

in the corpses of long-dead reindeer

buried in the permafrost.

When the corpses thawed in the heat wave,

the reawakened spores were released into the atmosphere

infecting the local reindeer population.

It didn't take too long before the bacteria spread

from the reindeer to humans.

♪♪

and this isn't an isolated case.

In 2017, a young man on the northern coast of alaska

was helping excavate an 800-year-old hunting shack.

In the process, he unwittingly disturbed seal remains

that had been preserved in the permafrost for years.

Irving: Initially, he didn't think anything of it.

But shortly after he went home,

he discovered a red dot on his leg.

Within a few days, that dot grew to the size of a softball.

Narrator: He had an infection called seal finger,

which he'd caught from the dead seals.

Luckily, doctors identified it quickly enough

and were able to treat the infection with antibiotics.

♪♪

it's one thing for a relatively young bacteria

like seal finger or anthrax to reawaken,

but the mollivirus has been in the permafrost for 30,000 years.

Does it have the strength to come back from the dead?

Poinar: This is a critical question.

If the answer is yes,

does that mean that smallpox or plague or spanish flu

could actually come back?

♪♪

it's a terrifying thought.

What if all the graves

of people who died of one plague or another

began to thaw like the reindeer

and suddenly awakened every deadly disease

our civilization has ever known?

Irving: Not only could known pathogens come back,

the same theory could apply to the ones we don't know about,

including those that have been long extinct.

Narrator: Scientists set about trying to resurrect mollivirus

in the laboratory, knowing full well

how monumental the results could be to the human race.

Irving: The virus needs a host cell,

so they gave it its favorite meal, an amoeba,

a single-celled organism.

They put them both in the dish, and they waited.

Macferrin: One of the biggest challenges

of bringing something like this back to life

is how old it is. It breaks down over time,

and it might not even be possible

if the dna is completely broken down.

Narrator: To everyone's surprise, the experiment worked.

The mollivirus invaded the amoeba and replicated itself.

After 30,000 years, the giant virus was reborn.

Viruses have been known to survive

in some pretty tough conditions.

But that's a pretty amazing feat.

♪♪

narrator: Scientists are now forced to consider an ominous idea.

Does this mean that viruses in the wild

could come back to life by themselves?

Irving: The virus that was reawakened was grown in a laboratory,

an ideal environment.

We can't say it would be able to do the same in the wild,

but if the environmental conditions were right,

it's a possibility.

The biomass of all viruses and bacteria frozen in the ice

is 1,000 times that of all the humans on earth.

Most of these viruses and bacteria

aren't going to harm us, but some could.

What if one of these pathogens thaws out of the permafrost

and is washed into a river

and then ultimately down into the ocean?

Narrator: Scientists continue to keep a watchful eye on the ice,

mindful that the world's thawing ice

could allow ancient microbial genes to mix with modern ones...

♪♪

...Flooding the oceans

with never-before-seen types of organisms.

How would it interact with the food chain?

What would be the impact on the environment

and ultimately on us?

We don't know the answers to these questions.

Hopefully, we'll never have to find out.