Antarctica is home to some of the most charismatic wildlife on Earth. Penguins by the thousand, humpback whales and orcas – these are the animals that compel people to travel all the way to the end of the Earth to see. But what about the life that’s normally hidden from view? At Swoop, we always love flying the flag for Antarctic krill, those small but mighty crustaceans at the heart of the Southern Ocean food web – but when you go even smaller, there’s a whole new and surprising world of life waiting to be discovered.
To learn more, we spoke to Antarctic explorer and filmmaker Ariel Waldman about putting polar life under the microscope, and how her new documentary Antarctic Unearthed reveals a new world beyond imagination.
How did you become interested in Antarctica as a filmmaker?
I specialise in telling stories about ecosystems at multiple orders of magnitude, from a microscopic to a planetary scale. I started my career as a graphic designer for ad agencies, then unexpectedly stumbled into a job at NASA helping them to connect and collaborate with the community. While I was there I learned about people who worked in the Antarctic to test the next generation of Mars rovers and other things of that nature.
I thought that was pretty fascinating, so I became more interested in going to Antarctica than going into space, and talked with researchers about how I could help contribute to Antarctic science alongside other astrobiologists who go down to Antarctica to study the microscopic biology that exists there.
They’re not often able to film the creatures that they study, so they aren’t able to describe a lot of the behaviors and the public doesn’t get to see what lives in Antarctica. So that set me up on my mission to film the microscopic life there. People often think of Antarctica just being a place with penguins but it’s so much more.
What is it about the microscopic world that you find so fascinating?
It’s just very compelling. The first time I encountered diatoms, I was really taken aback because they’re so intricate and perfect looking. They look as if a jeweller had created them. They’re a really beautiful side of wildlife that we don’t often get to see because they’re microscopic.
Diatoms are single cells of algae that have glass shells they create themselves by pulling silica out of the water. These glass shells come in a variety of shapes and sizes – some are perfect triangles and some are perfect circles, others look like stars. Since they’re algae they absorb a lot of carbon, and when they die, that carbon sinks to the bottom of the ocean which is very good from the perspective of the planet’s carbon cycle.
They’re plankton that drift with the sea, but some of them can glide and move around by themselves – we’re still trying to understand exactly what their mechanisms are for that. It’s completely unexpected when you see it for the first time. It’s something that I’m just fascinated by.
How did your first trip to Antarctica come about?
The (US) National Science Foundation had a program called the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. I proposed going there to film the microscopic life under the ice and create an interactive microscopic tour called lifeundertheice.org, that would be valuable both to researchers but also to people in a wider audience across the globe.
I wanted to create a way for people who may never get the opportunity to experience the invisible world of Antarctica. It’s a self-directed tour that recreates the feeling of looking down the microscope lens and moving around a petri dish to discover these different microscopic creatures.
Getting there is definitely an experience. To get to McMurdo Station, the largest US research base, it’s between a five to eight-hour flight from New Zealand on a cramped military plane that wasn’t designed with passengers in mind. You’re nervous because if they fly most of the way to Antarctica and the weather changes and it’s not safe to land, they just boomerang you straight back to New Zealand. The runway is made of compacted snow.
From McMurdo, most of my work was out in the Dry Valleys, which are a further 45-minute helicopter ride. Then you’re really just out there with barely anyone else in the middle of nowhere.
What’s it like to work in the Dry Valleys?
The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest area of Antarctica that aren’t fully covered in snow and ice. And so I love them because you can actually see the continent of Antarctica, so they offer a really unique perspective. They’re like this because of the Transantarctic Mountains which blocks much of the ice sheet from entering the area. They’re one of the closest analogues we have on Earth to Mars.
The McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research Group (LTER) there works in a place called Beacon Valley. They’ve found some amazing things. For a long time they thought that only bacteria could live there, but more recently they’ve discovered nematodes – tiny microscopic worms – can actually survive here, which has huge implications for our search for life on Mars and other moons in the Solar System.
The team I embedded with on my most recent expedition are nicknamed ‘The Worm Hunters’. Thanks to them we have data about the abundance of these different creatures in the soil and other ecosystems. A lot of them have lived there for many millennia and beyond – it’s a really fascinating study of a very remote ecosystem.
You also spent time filming tardigrades, which have to be some of the most extraordinary creatures on the planet.
I love tardigrades – they’re these tiny creatures that have really won people over, in part because they are known for being able to survive extremes. They’ve been exposed to the vacuum of space and survived. They can expel almost all the water in their bodies, and pop back to life under favourable conditions.
In the Antarctic dry valleys they’re found in soils, in frozen lakes and even inside glaciers. Microscopic moss is one of their favourite things, but different species eat bacteria, nematodes or even other tardigrades. Their ability to survive in these different ecosystems is really remarkable – the idea of surviving inside of a block of ice is absolutely fascinating.
You have a new documentary out called Antarctica Unearthed –
After my initial expedition I was able to travel to the LTER as a researcher, studying the soils and creatures of the Dry Valleys. I spent half the time doing research and lab work and the other half filming a documentary entirely by myself without a crew. I wanted to create a nature documentary about the Dry Valleys, so the challenge was to make a film that has Antarctic wildlife in it but all of it is microscopic.
For two months I filmed all of these different ecosystems that are very weird and strange and unusual looking, presenting Antarctica in a way that most people are unfamiliar with. When people see anything about Antarctica, there’s usually ice, wind and a lot of penguins and that’s kind of it. So my documentary reveals a unique side of Antarctica, along with an entire cast of characters that are all microscopic and charismatic, even though they’re not penguins. It has tardigrades and nematodes and rotifers, showing just how weird and strange and wonderful they are.
How do you approach storytelling on a microscopic level?
A wildlife filmmaker might spend weeks in the jungle trying to get that one jaguar shot, and microscopy is very similar. You wait patiently for hours to generate enough footage to show compelling stories.
And there is some great wildlife. There are predator tardigrades that look like big brawlers when you film them. One of the smaller tardigrades that eat bacteria and algae shows up in the film – you watch as it struggles to break into a cyanobacteria sac – it’s very dramatic. I think those tiny minor interactions we never get to see are really interesting. People get to see how these aren’t little squiggly bacterias randomly moving around, but animals going through their own microscopic jungles looking for food. It gives them a little more character.
When will you be returning to Antarctica?
My next expedition is scheduled for February 2027, and supported by the National Geographic Society. I’ll be looking at life in and around the icebergs along the Antarctic Peninsula.
*
Antarctica Unearthed premiers in the USA on PBS stations in 2026. Explore Ariel Walman’s Antarctic microscopy at Life Under The Ice.
*
