In the HP Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, one of the canonical works of the Cthulhu Mythos, a race of extra-terrestrial beings,point out to most scientifically as the Elder Things, arrived on Earth during its infancy and settled down in a landmass which would eventually become Antarctica.
There they constructed vast, sharp-angled stone structures to dwell, study and create life in, the implication being that all life on earth is a result of spillover from their biochemical experimentation. But it’s just a story, right? Right?
Well, it sure looks like NASA just found one of those edifices.
Scientists working on Operation IceBridge — a NASA project that is studying how Polar Regions are reacting to climate change – came across an iceberg that seems constructed rather than natural.
During a routine flight across the Antarctic landscape, researchers spotted a perfect square of an iceberg of such vast dimensions that even the Titanic crew would have spotted it in time. Estimated to stretch over a mile, this ginormous frozen monolith is the world’s largest ice-cube. Or one of the previously discussed alien apartment complexes.
This would seem like the beginning of a great horror story, and just in time for Halloween too.
It would, but then science had to try and play spoilsport with facts. Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA (how cool a job must that be!) and at the University of Maryland, explained in an interview with Live Science that it was likely formed by a process that’s fairly common along the edges of icebergs.
Brunt said, “So, here’s the deal. We get two types of icebergs: We get the type that everyone can envision in their head that sank the Titanic, and they look like prisms or triangles at the surface and you know they have a crazy subsurface. And then you have what are called ‘tabular icebergs.'”
According to Brunt, tabular icebergs are wide and flat, and long, like sheet cake. They split from the edges of ice shelves — large blocks of ice, connected to land but floating in the water surrounding iced-over places like Antarctica. Apparently, these are “naturally occurring phenomenon”.
Suuuure NASA. And Area 51 in Roswell is just an “air force base”.
