The Mysteries of Earth's Emptiest Places: Why Almost Nobody Lives There

Almost everyone on Earth lives on about a tenth of its land. This documentary visits seven of Earth's emptiest places, where the nearest people can be two soldiers on a dog sled or astronauts passing overhead, and asks why so few people live there. In the Sahara, seabed dust and lakeside graves show a desert that was green until about 5,500 years ago, and how its drying pushed people onto the Nile, where 95 of every 100 Egyptians now live. On the Tibetan Plateau, where each breath holds a little more than half the oxygen of sea level, Tibetans carry a gene inherited from the extinct Denisovans. In Northeast Greenland National Park, the largest in the world, two-person Sirius patrols keep crossing the ice by dog sled, a small presence that a 1933 international court ruling said can be enough to hold empty land. Along the way: Why the islanders of Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited island on Earth, voted 148 to 5 to go home after a volcano sent them to England. What a 1964 survey party found in a lagoon on Bouvet Island, the remotest island on the planet, and the Soviet record that probably explains it. How a Soviet surgeon removed his own appendix in the Antarctic winter of 1961, and why spacecraft are steered into the sea at Point Nemo, 2,688 km from any land. It ends in the South Pacific Gyre, the largest ocean desert on Earth, where microbes buried in seafloor mud for 101.5 million years came back to life in a lab. This channel makes documentaries about how the physical world works, told through maps, measurements and the scientific record. Sources used: EC Joint Research Centre (2008), Global Accessibility Map — https://forobs.jrc.ec.europa.eu/gam NASA Earth Observatory (2012), City Lights Illuminate the Nile — https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-... deMenocal et al. (2000), The African Humid Period, Quaternary Science Reviews — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... Kuper & Kröpelin (2006), Holocene occupation in the Sahara, Science — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... Sereno et al. (2008), Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara, PLOS ONE — https://journals.plos.org/plosone/art... British Museum, Cave of Swimmers, Egypt — https://africanrockart.britishmuseum.... Huerta-Sánchez et al. (2014), Denisovan-like DNA and altitude adaptation in Tibetans, Nature — https://www.nature.com/articles/natur... Chen et al. (2019), A Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau, Nature — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158... George B. Schaller (2013), Chang Tang Nature Reserve — https://www.aam-us.org/2013/05/01/cha... GRID-Arendal, Northeast Greenland National Park — https://www.grida.no/resources/3989 Permanent Court of International Justice (1933), Legal Status of Eastern Greenland — https://jusmundi.com/en/document/deci... National Geographic (2012), The Cold Patrol — https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ma... Tristan da Cunha Government, Volcanic Interlude 1961–1963 — https://www.tristandc.com/history1961... UK Government (2026), Parachute drop to Tristan da Cunha — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mi... Guinness World Records, Most remote inhabited island — https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/... Guinness World Records, Remotest island — https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/... Norwegian Polar Institute, Bouvetøya — https://npolar.no/en/themes/bouvetoya/ Geographical, The lifeboat at the world's end — https://geographical.co.uk/news/pheno... Australian Antarctic Program, Antarctic geography and geology — https://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-a... European Space Agency, Concordia: Earth's most remote laboratory — https://blogs.esa.int/concordia/conco... Rogozov & Bermel (2009), Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic, BMJ — https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b... NOAA Ocean Service, Where is Point Nemo? — https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/n... Hrvoje Lukatela (2022), Point Nemo, revisited — https://www.lukatela.com/pointNemoRev... NASA Earth Observatory (2017), Searching for the Bluest — https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-... Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (2019), Largest ocean desert — https://www.mpi-bremen.de/en/Remote-b... Morono et al. (2020), Microbial life in 101.5-million-year-old sediment, Nature Communications — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146...