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Many of us would immediately associate giant pyramids with Egypt, but one similar structure spotted in Antarctica has left people theorising that the continent may have once been home to an ancient civilisation responsible for the ‘pyramid’.
The peak, which sparked an online conversation in 2016, is part of the Ellsworth Mountains, and not far from the Patriot Hill research base.
It’s become the subject of outlandish conspiracy theories, with the YouTube channel ThirdPhaseOfMoon releasing a video in 2016 about the then US secretary of state visiting the "alien UFO base”.
Except the reality is far more underwhelming, with California professor and senior research scientist at NASA Eric Rignot telling LiveScience: “This is just a mountain that looks like a pyramid.”
Well then.
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He added: “Pyramid shapes are not impossible – many peaks partially look like pyramids, but they only have one to two faces like that, rarely four.”
Meanwhile Mauri Pelto, a professor of environmental science at Nichols College, Massachusetts, told the outlet that the formation of the mountain’s sides likely happened as a result of erosion – specifically, ‘freeze-thaw erosion’ where snow and water fills crevices in rocks during the day before freezing at night, expanding and applying pressure to the rock.
And this isn’t the only weird story to come out of Antarctica, as flowers are blooming there – which is actually a sign of global warming – and it’s been reported that an ‘Antarctica accent’ is actually a thing (despite the continent having no natural human habitation).
“The Antarctic accent is not really perceptible as such – it would take much longer for it to become so – but it is acoustically measurable,” Jonathan Harrington, of the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich said.
Why not read…?
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- Part of the sun is broken and scientists are baffled
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