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How could the weather in space have impacted the fate of the Titanic?

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A strong geomagnetic storm can cause havoc on a large scale.

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What secrets of America's nuclear past lie in the frozen waters of Greenland?

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The fact that people haven't realized what it was is mind-blowing.

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And who is to blame when a bag of human hands is found on the banks of a Siberian river?

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Who are these people? Whose hands are they?

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The underwater realm is another dimension.

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It's a physically hostile place, where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.

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I'm Jeremy Wade, and I'm searching the world to bring you the most iconic and baffling underwater mysteries known to science.

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The vast majority of our ocean is unobserved, unmapped and unexplored.

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It's a dangerous frontier that swallows evidence.

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Do you have nowhere to run?

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Where unknown is normal, and understanding is rare.

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It's a tale we all know.

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April 14th, 1912.

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RMS Titanic collides with an iceberg and sinks into the freezing water of the North Atlantic.

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More than 1,500 people perish.

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The reasons behind the world's most infamous ocean disaster have been debated for more than a century.

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From lack of lifeboats to human error.

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Now, could a phenomenon called space weather change everything we thought we knew about the loss of this unsinkable ship?

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The largest moving man-made structure on Earth sets sail from Southampton, heading to New York on its maiden voyage.

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Over 2,000 passengers and crew are on board the Titanic.

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It was the largest and most luxurious ship that had been built.

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It was supposed to be the most secure, the safest, the most watertight.

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Everybody knows the story of the Titanic. Greatest ship, a ship that wasn't made to sink, actually sank.

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Four days into her journey, the Titanic collides with an immense iceberg.

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The frozen mass towers 100 feet above the water and weighs an immovable 2 million tons.

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Only 705 people survive, less than a third of those on board.

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How did this happen? How come no one came to the rescue right away? Who's to blame?

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We're still searching for answers more than 100 years later.

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An inquiry begins into what went so tragically wrong.

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The month-long investigation is overseen by Lord Mersey, who takes volumes of notes in his private journals.

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After the hearings end, these journals are kept locked away by his descendants for more than a century.

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It's not until 2020 that they're finally released.

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His journals reveal his innermost thoughts on the inquiry.

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Can Lord Mersey's newly disclosed writings finally expose the truth?

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He mentions in the journal that the watertight doors in the hull were left open after initially being closed.

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If these doors are left open, then water can flood the length of the vessel and also create instability as the weight shifts.

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This finding was made public in the initial investigation, but the notes also confirm something that's only ever been speculated.

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Mersey had underlined and paid special attention to one key detail. There was no reduction in speed following the impact.

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Captain Smith ordered the ship to move forward at a steady pace for another 20 minutes, a decision that had disastrous consequences.

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By keeping going, that means more water coming into the hull. This puts pressure on the bulkheads.

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The journals give us new insight into how the ship sank so quickly.

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But the full story of how the collision happened is still a mystery.

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Then a scientific discovery in 2020 gives rise to a completely new theory, something that has never been considered before.

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The night that it sank, it was actually a very beautiful, very cold, but very calm night. The sea was said to have been really flat.

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Many of the people who were rescued said, oh, the aurora borealis were beautiful that night. They fanned through the sky. It was marvelous. It was spectacular.

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Behind this beautiful light show lies formidable power, and it's something that weather researcher Mila Zinkova believes could have played a defining role in the Titanic disaster.

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The aurora borealis is the most beautiful manifestation of a geomagnetic storm.

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Geomagnetic or solar storms are caused by charged particles shooting towards the Earth at a speed of nearly 200,000 miles per second.

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The magnetic field guides these particles towards the north and the south pole, and so when they come down to around the 100 kilometers or so, they bang into the molecules of the air and they cause light to be emitted.

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And these charged particles in the sky cause more than an extraordinary light show.

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A strong geomagnetic storm can cause havoc, and I mean havoc on a large scale.

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All this kind of cloud of particles cause the magnetic field to kind of wobble or to vibrate, and that generates currents in the Earth.

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If you look at the global risks to civilization, a space where there is right up there.

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So extreme weather conditions in space can wreak havoc on Earth.

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1989, a geomagnetic storm causes a 12-hour power outage in Quebec.

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It damages a nuclear power plant in New Jersey, plunging 6 million people into darkness.

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That solar storm of 1989 was an immensely powerful storm. Big. Bigger than your average solar storm.

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Could a similar event have contributed to the sinking of the world's greatest ship?

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In the Titanic era, a compass was the most important navigational tool, an instrument that depends totally on the stability of the Earth's magnetic field.

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If you were sitting on a ship in the middle of the ocean, a wobble to the magnetic field could make it look like North was somewhere else.

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Could the geomagnetic storm that night have affected the ship's compass so much that it changed the Titanic's intended course?

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Formate was important to establish the strength of the geomagnetic storm.

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By studying the space weather from that night, Mila made a vital breakthrough.

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I believe that the geomagnetic storm that night was around moderate to strong.

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Most major solar storms occur between 50 and 55 degrees of geomagnetic latitude, the precise region where the Titanic is found.

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Something else has also been recently discovered, a hand-drawn observation of the sun from the day before the Titanic sinks, showing a sunspot.

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Sunspots are areas on the sun where the magnetic field is much stronger. This can cause solar flares and explosions called coronal mass ejections.

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These can contribute to even more powerful geomagnetic storms on Earth.

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Is this further evidence that an intense solar storm played a decisive role in the tragedy?

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Aurora Borealis happens all the time. Where there are people in the Canadian Maritime going, whoo, this is a light show.

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Where there are people on the American West Coast, Alaska and Norway seeing the same thing.

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Mila's research on covers that magnetometers around the world did in fact pick up the storm.

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Sensors in Alaska, Canada and Scotland all are disturbed around the time of the sinking.

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So this celestial event was strong enough to be detected everywhere.

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But did it have a critical influence on the reliability of the Titanic's compass?

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The compass was not reliable. Cause it affected the ship travel.

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Mila believes if the compass was just 0.5 degrees off, it could have altered the Titanic's course and therefore how it collided with the iceberg.

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A slight difference in the angle would have changed everything.

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The ship hits the iceberg on the side and six of the 16 compartments are damaged.

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If three of the watertight compartments had been damaged, it might have survived.

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A solar storm may have contributed to the catastrophic sinking of the Titanic, but further investigation is showing that its effects may not have been entirely destructive.

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It could even have played a key beneficial role in the rescue of the survivors.

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More than 2,000 passengers and crew fought for their lives on the night the Titanic sank.

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Over 700 of them managed to escape the icy depths of the North Atlantic. Many people are still wondering how they did it.

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New research suggests space weather played a key role in the rescue ship Carpathia finding the survivors.

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Was this a celestial saviour to those in need of rescue?

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2340 hours, April 14th, 1912. The Titanic has collided with an iceberg of unimaginable size.

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The ship's fourth officer, Joseph Boxall, determines their position to send out an SOS.

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Boxall calculates the SOS position and he's 13 nautical miles off.

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If the geomagnetic storm did affect the Titanic's compass, it could have contributed to this false reading with big ramifications for the rescue.

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The Titanic's incorrect position is sent out. Yet bizarrely, one ship, the RMS Carpathia, manages to locate the stricken lifeboats.

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How could this be possible if they received the wrong location?

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I believe the geomagnetic storm was responsible for helping Carpathia to find the Titanic survivors.

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As well as the Titanic's compass, Mila believes the storm also affected the Carpathia,

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accidentally leading them straight to the lifeboats.

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One researcher told me it couldn't be a geomagnetic storm because if it was, then all ships in the area would have been affected.

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And guess what? They all were affected? Titanic, Californian, Mount Temple and the Carpathia. All of them, all four ships.

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If the Carpathia had not been affected by the compass variation, it could have missed the lifeboats by six nautical miles.

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It was a lucky coincidence and dissituation.

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Because of this, the Carpathia saves 705 people from the freezing water.

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But could the storm have had a further impact on why more boats didn't come to the Titanic's aid?

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The storm that night might have affected the radio communication of nearby ships with cataclysmic effect.

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Some ships were able to communicate with ships that were farther away from them, but were not able to communicate with the ships that were closer.

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Many ships that night report abnormal malfunctions of their communication equipment.

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La Provence could contact the Titanic, but could hear the Olympic, which was 500 miles further away than the Titanic.

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The Baltic couldn't hear the Mount Temple, but it could communicate with the Virginia, which was further away.

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The Mount Temple responds to the SOS, but the Titanic doesn't get the call.

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What dealt the definitive blow to the Titanic, with its 2200 people on board, will continue to confound us.

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But the might of space weather has added a new line of inquiry to this tragic mystery.

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It was just another strike for it. I guess once you say you have an unsinkable ship, the universe is going to turn against you and try to sink you at whatever the cost.

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Every year, 8 million tons of trash ends up in our oceans.

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In 2018, on a remote Siberian island, something turns up that is truly bizarre. A bag of frozen hands.

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Where it came from and how it ended up on this icy beach puzzles locals and scientists alike.

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The Amur River in the southeast of Siberia, 19 miles from the border with China.

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On March 8th, 2018, a fisherman makes a grim discovery.

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He sees a hand coming out of the snow.

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He searches for clues as to where it has come from and makes an even more disturbing find.

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When he goes to investigate it further, he finds 53 more hands.

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The severed frozen hands are spilling out of an unmarked bag.

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It is not a good day if you stumbled upon a bag full of frozen hands.

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This gory find sparks intense speculation.

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Why would somebody have a bag of frozen hands? Who are these people? Whose hands are they?

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Incredibly, body parts washing up on shores around the world is not a new phenomenon.

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There were cases of feet showing up on the coastline in Canada.

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15 feet have been found over 12 years.

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Investigations reveal the feet had become severed from the decomposing bodies of accidental deaths or suicides,

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kept intact by the sneakers that acted as flotation devices.

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Unique ocean currents in this wild and remote area pushed them all onto a small strip of shore in British Columbia.

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Can the same science help pinpoint where the gruesome bag of hands started its Siberian journey

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and lead investigators to the people responsible?

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Were they brought there? Did they go through the water?

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You could have it sort of going along the bottom in a slower manner

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versus the speed at which it would probably travel if it stayed on the surface.

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How the bag traveled would also depend on the Siberian climate.

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The water around the island where the bag was found wouldn't have been fully flowing until April.

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So there could be ice jams which could raise the level of the river.

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All of these little pieces of information and clues can help to reconstruct their history.

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Whether the bag washed ashore the previous spring and was then buried under snow

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or just traveled a short distance more recently is unknown.

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But this doesn't stop some people jumping to sinister conclusions.

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Clearly they were collected and put together.

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As the story breaks, wild rumors circulate.

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This location is 19 miles from where the river borders with China.

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Is this the work of the Russian or Chinese mafia?

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Could it be evidence of limbs cut off to hide their identities?

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When a bag of frozen hands washes up from a Siberian river,

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there's intense speculation that organized crime syndicates are involved.

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They're infamous for disposing their victims in the watery depths of rivers and oceans.

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However, authorities didn't know that the river was a river.

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They didn't know that the river was a river.

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They didn't know that the water was a river.

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They didn't know that the river was a river.

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They didn't know that the water was a river.

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But it's not the same as the watery depths of rivers and oceans.

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However, authorities discount the controversial theory

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and announced that the hands have come from a local forensics lab.

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It's a claim that raises even more suspicion.

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In some cases, when a dead body is discovered and you're unable to identify it,

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medical examiners will retain one of their hands to hold on to the fingerprints.

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This way, they hope to be able to identify them in the future.

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Why wouldn't you just do the fingerprints with the hands still attached to the body?

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Forensic labs elsewhere in the world have been known to hold on to body parts.

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London, 1989.

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In a tragic accident, the Martian S pleasure boat collides with a dredger on the river Thames

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and sinks.

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51 people are killed.

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More than 20 hands of the victims of the Martian S are severed and retained.

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These hands should have been returned to their rightful owners

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and buried along with the rest of the human remains.

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The hands from the Martian S disaster and the 54 frozen hands found in Siberia

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do have something in common.

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They've all been immersed in water.

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You can get expansion and changes to the skin that's going to alter what the prints look like.

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So to be able to fingerprint a hand that's gone through that type of decomposition is very difficult.

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At the time of the Martian S disaster, fingerprinting is the main way to identify a dead body.

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And the only lab that has the equipment to take prints from waterlogged hands has limited storage.

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However, 30 years later when the Siberian frozen hands are discovered, forensic methods have moved on.

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We don't need to sever hands anymore to identify who someone is.

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Today, DNA analysis and other tools tell us so much more than fingerprints can.

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Radiocarbon dating can be used to determine when an individual lived and died.

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Stable isotope analysis allows us to determine the kinds of things that they ate,

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while strontium isotope analysis can tell us where they grew up.

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Why would the frozen hands be removed when advances in forensic investigation means it's no longer necessary?

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Storing a body takes up a lot of space and is quite costly in a morgher facility that has refrigeration.

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So instead, storing a single hand is much easier and cost effective.

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If they were retained for identification, why are they then found abandoned in a bag?

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This is not the way though you dispose of human remains in any circumstance.

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A day after the discovery in a bizarre twist, the official narrative is refuted.

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Both the forensic authorities and the disposal company strongly deny any involvement.

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They claim their last disposal was made in 2015.

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Who severed the hands and why may never be fully proven,

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but is there still a chance of finding out who they belong to?

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DNA is particularly well preserved in very cold climates.

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Some of the best preserved DNA we've ever discovered has come from the Siberian region,

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even in the case of Ice Age animals.

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So there's every chance that this DNA will lead us to who these people are.

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What the genetic tests could reveal and if they will even be undertaken is still unknown.

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And there's still one big obstacle to finally solving this puzzle.

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If these people aren't on record and nobody's actively looking for them, this could remain a mystery.

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In the early hours of Sunday, May 31st, 2020, the megaton oil tanker Willowey is sailing in the South Atlantic

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when it puts out an urgent May Day call.

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They've lost control and they're spinning in circles.

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Other ships in the area are reported to be experiencing the same bizarre disease.

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The first one to be found is the Mekaton Oil Tanker.

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Other ships in the area are reported to be experiencing the same bizarre rotating.

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What could be causing this inexplicable nautical nightmare?

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The ship carrying thousands of tons of crude oil starts spinning in a circle.

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They lost control.

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Confusion erupts on the bridge as the captain desperately tries to get back on course.

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You would be in a huge state of panic.

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It's devastation waiting to happen.

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What's even more frightening for the crew of the Willowey is that four other ships are reported to be sailing in circles nearby.

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The potential for destruction is terrifying.

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If they don't fix it, they could well converge and crash.

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How is it possible for five gigantic vessels to be turning in circles in the middle of the ocean?

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To have so many ships at one time having the same human error seems quite odd.

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Perhaps there's some sort of other physical force at play.

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300 miles off the coast of South Africa, the crew of the oil tanker Willowey are desperately searching for a reason as to why they have suddenly started turning in circles, dangerously close to four other ships.

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At first the senior officers assumed that it's secret that the ocean itself are moving the ships around.

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Could the answer behind this mystery be down to the sheer power of the water?

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Ocean currents may have contributed to its spinning a bit. It's unlikely that ocean currents could make a ship spin continuously.

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With the strength of the ocean currents unlikely to be causing these bizarre nautical rotations, what else might be behind this terrifying event?

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The ocean is quite a lawless place.

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Could a new growing criminal activity be responsible?

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The more connected we are to the internet and international systems, the more likely we are to experience hacking.

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Could someone have remotely hijacked the ship?

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Hackers can manipulate a vessel's navigational tools by overriding its GPS signal.

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You are feeding false data to the ship, so it thinks it's doing a correct heading, it's going in the right way.

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So if you can fool them, then the ship will go where you want it to go.

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It's an illegal practice called spoofing.

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But why would hackers want to manipulate the Willowey's GPS?

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An oil tanker could potentially be the target of spoofing to alter its course for some sort of nefarious purpose.

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Say for example to run a vessel aground in a narrow strait.

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The 57,000 tons of crude oil on the Willowey could be worth more than $11 million.

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Are criminals trying to re-root it in an attempt to steal the valuable cargo?

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Piracy has not gone away. It's often connected with large multinational criminal organizations.

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Huge organizations which have a lot of money, a lot of resources.

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In 2020 GPS data appears to show more megaton cargo ships spinning out of control.

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With scientific investigators SkyTruth revealing a strange case of Point Reyes, California.

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It shows many circles which are supposed to be the paths of different ships.

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The team monitoring the Californian data believe these tracks are possibly the result of large scale GPS manipulation.

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Designed to undermine a tracking network called Automatic Identification System or AIS.

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It's a system that ships have to have now to track where they are.

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It means you can finally see who's doing what.

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Until AIS started monitoring criminal activity, the sea was much harder to police.

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There is piracy, there is illegal contraband smuggling, there is human trafficking, there is the training in arms.

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It's really a wild west.

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So obviously there is a huge interest by a lot of criminals in subverting these systems.

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Extreme manipulation of the AIS system has also been investigated along the Chinese coast in 2019.

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When the GPS of hundreds of ships mysteriously malfunctioned, all of them reportedly close to valuable targets for criminals.

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This seems to often occur near oil ports and refinery facilities.

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Is this evidence that powerful entities are determined to distort the GPS of ships in order to conceal criminal activity?

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International states are engaging in hacking of all forms more and more.

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So there's every chance that international superpowers could be responsible for GPS spoofing.

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No one knows for sure who is behind the spoofing of the Chinese and American coasts.

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But is the willowy a victim of GPS manipulation?

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Where the oil tanker was sailing may give a tantalizing clue.

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There's less patrols, there's less scrutiny on that route.

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So it would be much easier to hijack a vessel off the west coast of Africa

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than would off the coast of Europe, for example.

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After urgent investigation, the crew of the willowy in communication with officials on shore

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come to a conclusion as to what is behind this bizarre behavior.

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The ship's gyro compass.

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It's one of the systems which the ship relies on in order to maintain a steady course.

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The gyro compass is wrong.

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It's not calibrating.

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If it fails, it could cause exactly the issues which the willowy is experiencing,

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potentially resulting in a crash with a nearby ship.

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Luckily, they avoid a collision by switching to their secondary gyro compass,

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and for further measure, they then continue on their route using an old-fashioned magnetic compass.

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But the failed gyro compass on the willowy doesn't explain why the four other ships are reportedly spinning.

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Could a startling new discovery in the area they are sailing in hold the key to unlocking this mystery?

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The South Atlantic, where the willowy and four other ships are at risk from a looming menace,

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one that's hidden from view but growing by the day.

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The planet and everyone on it is protected from the sun's deadly radiation by the Earth's magnetic field.

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The planet and everyone on it is protected from the sun's deadly radiation by the Earth's magnetic field.

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But scientists have detected a localised weakening of this vital shield.

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It's called the South Atlantic Anomaly.

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The South Atlantic Anomaly is an anomaly over the South Atlantic but in space.

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The anomaly allows the sun's radiation to penetrate deeper into the Earth's atmosphere.

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Between Chile and Zimbabwe, the Earth's protective shield has deteriorated 6% in just 50 years.

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And the ships reported to be spinning are located directly below.

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Could the extra radiation leaking into our atmosphere be affecting their navigation?

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Above the regions of the South Atlantic Anomaly we can have some problems with maybe detection of the signals from the satellite, accuracy of the signals.

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And that's because the medium between the ground and the satellite has been affected.

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It's not out of the realm of possibility that this could have affected the ships near the willow-y.

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And this growing dent in the Earth's magnetic field could be a sign of something potentially catastrophic for the planet.

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Collapses of the Earth's magnetic field would basically allow all the radiation which is ejected from the sun to hit the surface of the Earth without any form of defence.

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Without it, we're doomed.

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Stat simple.

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Deep below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a radioactive mystery is unfolding.

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Throughout recent history, the testing of nuclear weapons by the world's superpowers has been shrouded in secrecy.

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But scientists are now discovering strange deep-sea creatures and hidden inside them explosive secrets from the world's nuclear past.

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2019, do scientists find in some of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean something unusual?

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These are huge.

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The scientists observe that the amphibons that are living in the deep water are much larger than what you see in shallower water.

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And their freakish size is not the most bizarre discovery.

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They're flooded with radiation.

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How can these creatures, dwelling in one of the most remote places on Earth, be radioactive?

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Between 1946 and 1958, the United States runs numerous nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands and the Pacific.

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As the Cold War escalates and fears for American security intensify, scientists test nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union over and over in the South Pacific.

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They fundamentally believe that the biggest possible bang is the biggest possible deterrent.

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It should have taken centuries for our ocean currents to carry this nuclear fallout to the deepest marine trenches.

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But it turns out the radiation has spread much more quickly.

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Radioactive carbon is now making its way into the marine food chain.

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Science has revealed that organisms at the sea's surface have been ingesting this so-called bomb carbon since the 1950s.

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And the organic matter from these surface organisms falls to the deepest seabeds, where creatures like amphipods consume it.

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It's evidence that the Cold War nuclear fallout could now be in every corner of our oceans.

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But whether radioactive material is the reason behind the amphipods' extraordinary size is contested.

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Size difference could be for a few different reasons, and it may not be affecting them in any way.

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In 1963, the nuclear testing that created so-called radioactive amphipods comes to an end.

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But 60 years later on the other side of the world, a discovery from deep under the Arctic ice sheet reveals another secret part of America's nuclear operations.

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In 2019 at the University of Vermont, climate scientist Drew Christ makes a life-changing discovery.

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For me, as a climate scientist, receiving these samples in the lab was like holding the Holy Grail.

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It's the remains of an ice core drilled from deep within Greenland's ice sheet.

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An ice core is actually a tube of ice which contains in it sediments and bits of rock.

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And this one has a very peculiar history.

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What's so unusual about this particular ice core is that it bounced around between various research institutes around the world over a number of years.

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They were in these scientific cookie jars that had these old labels that were written that said Camp Century sub-ice on them.

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Camp Century was an American military research base in Northern Greenland.

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But until recently, its operations have been failed in secrecy.

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What was its true purpose? And what is the significance of the mysterious ice core taken from deep beneath the camp?

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The fact that this has been going around for nearly 40 years and people haven't realized what it was...

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...is mind-blowing.

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It's the height of the Cold War and the two great adversaries, America and Russia, are separated by only two and a half miles at the narrowest point.

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This threat leads the US Army to undertake one of its most secretive missions, 25 feet under the Greenland ice sheet.

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What does this mysterious place deep below the frozen water reveal about America's secret nuclear past?

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And surprisingly, the future of our planet.

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The background to this story is very weird and kind of like science fiction.

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Imagine a network of 21 tonnes with a total length of nearly two miles underneath Greenland's ice, all powered by a nuclear reactor.

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To the public, it's a climate research base.

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But Camp Century is actually the location of a top secret initiative called Project Iceworm,

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whose goal is to establish a missile launch site within easy striking range of the Soviet Union, all hidden beneath the ice, and capable of unleashing 600 nuclear warheads.

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How did they go about that?

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They didn't understand the fundamental properties of the ice.

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So they went there and funded a lot of really incredible science to study what ice does, how it behaves.

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To do this, they drill a mile down deep into the Greenland ice sheet.

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They recovered all these cylinders of ice in about 1.5 metre long segments.

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And what they learn forces them to abandon their hopes for a missile launching base.

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The problem is, ice is really not very stable. It changes, it warms up, it melts, it solidifies.

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And it's a really bad thing to put nuclear missiles on an unstable ice surface that can move around potentially damaging those missiles.

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With the added weight of falling snow, tunnels that start as 20 feet wide slowly collapse.

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Sort of like when the walls in the trash compactor scene in Star Wars happens. Slowly over time it started to compress in.

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But with the end of the Cold War, America's need for a missile site at Camp Century comes to an abrupt halt.

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But 60 years later, the discovery of the long missing Camp Century ice core warns of a new and potentially more devastating threat.

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What else is to be revealed about this top secret base?

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Using advanced analytical techniques, Drew probes the sediment at the bottom of the Camp Century ice core.

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Ice cores record history. They give us a little stamp on what was happening in the atmosphere and the environment at a given time in the past.

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The further down you drill into the ice, the further back in time you're going.

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What Drew finds at the bottom of this time capsule is truly mind blowing.

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It was one of the Eureka moments. I thought that that didn't happen to scientists. I thought that was just something that happened in movies.

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In the sediment are traces of plant fossils, proving that within the last million years, Greenland was once ice free.

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For the first time, we saw just how dynamic Earth's climate can be and how quickly it could change.

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We knew that this was a new chapter in the story of Camp Century.

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This discovery proves that Greenland is more susceptible to climate change than we previously thought.

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It's not a case of if the ice sheet is melting, but how fast?

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The ice core exposes a very real threat to all those people who live along the coasts of the world's oceans.

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It's a massive store of frozen water that can raise sea level as much as seven meters.

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As a scientist, this sort of information is really fascinating, but of course as a citizen and a human living on this planet, it's horrifying.

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All this from the scientific analysis of a long forgotten ice core sample and the discovery of the microscopic evidence hidden inside.

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Camp Century has been invaluable for science, but not in the way that it was intended.

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The legacy of US nuclear ambitions in Greenland reveals a critical and unexpected truth about our oceans.

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One that may help scientists help us combat the threat of climate change.