Hi, it's Ted Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. 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 and NASA advisor

who explores this kind of wildlife at the microscopic scale. In her TED 2020 talk, she shares

the wonder of the continent that is indeed 98% ice and why its ecosystem is powerful and

crucial to life on this planet.

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

Or that there are life forms that are invisible to us, but astronauts see them all the time.

These invisible glass creatures aren't aliens on a faraway 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, yeah, glass. You can see them in swirls of ocean surface colors from space, and when they die,

their 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 sight, 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. They're 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 a 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.

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