The Scariest Creature Swimming in Antarctica

What is the scariest creature living in Antarctica: the killer whales that hunt seals in packs, the colossal squid with the largest eye on Earth, or the animal that polar dive teams keep their own alarm horn for? At Vostok Station, on 21 July 1983, the air dropped to minus 89.2 degrees Celsius, the coldest temperature ever recorded on the surface of the Earth. There is no road in or out, and when something goes wrong, help is measured in days, sometimes weeks. In April 2001, the South Pole station's own doctor, Ronald Shemenski, waited roughly two weeks for a plane. The obvious answer is the orca. Type B killer whales off the Antarctic Peninsula line up side by side and wash seals off the ice with coordinated waves, and fourteen of the fifteen kills in one study were Weddell seals. Yet wild orcas have never killed a human being anywhere in recorded history. Every death linked to a killer whale happened in a tank. Then there is the leopard seal, Hydrurga leptonyx: up to 3.5 meters and around 600 kilograms, the only seal on Earth that eats other seals. On 22 July 2003, at Rothera Research Station, Kirsty Brown, a 28-year-old marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, was snorkeling twenty meters from the beach when a leopard seal took her. Her dive computer recorded a maximum depth of 70.1 meters. A coroner from the Falkland Islands ruled accidental death by drowning, caused by a leopard seal attack. It is the only human death ever attributed to the species. Snorkeling has been banned ever since, the US Antarctic dive manual reserves one horn signal for "leopard seal spotted," and field teams read the penguins: if they refuse to enter the water, a leopard seal is probably near. And the number almost nobody says out loud: in 8,947 British Antarctic Survey dives since 1970, physical contact between a diver and a leopard seal happened four times. So what actually kills people in Antarctica? Of 29 British Antarctic Survey staff who died on the job since 1948, thirteen were taken by the ice and one by an animal. The video walks through the Mount Newall carbon dioxide deaths of 2018, the Hope Bay fire of 1948, Air New Zealand Flight 901 on Mount Erebus in 1979, the Argentine Navy crash on Livingston Island in 1976, the winds of Cape Denison, and the first minute of cold shock in water at minus 1.8 degrees. Then the hoaxes: Ningen, Admiral Byrd's "secret diary," polar bears in Antarctica, and AI-generated ice monsters. It ends with Paul Nicklen and the female leopard seal who spent four days bringing him penguins. Places: Vostok, the South Pole, McMurdo, the Antarctic Peninsula, Rothera, Mount Newall, Hope Bay, Mount Erebus, Livingston Island, Cape Denison, South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, False Bay. For education only. Not diving or safety advice. Never enter polar water without trained support.