Fact check: Melting ice reveals UFO in Antarctica - or does it?

A popular YouTuber claims to have found evidence of a UFO in Antarctica using Google Earth.

MrMBB333, who has more than 450,000 subscribers, uploaded a video of the strange object on Friday - it's been watched hundreds of thousands of times since then. 

"This appears to be a 60 foot-wide disc sticking out of the ground apparently being recently revealed by the melting snow and ice," he says in the video, which has made headlines in the British tabloids.

"There is the object, it looks like it was intelligently designed. Half of it is under the ground the other half is on top of frozen snow and ice - you can tell this area started to thaw out."

The satellite image is relatively recent, being dated 2020. 

Despite the breathless reporting in the likes of the Daily Star and American media network iHeartMedia, the object is clearly just a lake or pond.

MrMBB333's video only shows the satellite image rotated about 130 degrees clockwise, creating an optical illusion that the lake and its sloping shores are convex rather than concave - they appear to jut out of the Antarctic surface, rather than sink in.

The original image seen at its correct orientation clearly shows the object is just a pool of water, sitting amongst ice next to rock. Nearby streams and rivers are the exact same shade of dark blue. You can even see small streams of water running into the pond.

The pool of water.
The pool of water - left, in the video; right, the right way up. Photo credit: Google Earth

Also in the video, MrMBB333 changes the colour and contrast, claiming this brings out hidden features in the object - Newshub did the same, and found the features lined up with a pattern in the image introduced by using jpeg compression - in other words, they probably don't exist in reality, and is just a result of Google Earth using lower-quality images to make it fast to use.

A copy of the Google Earth image adjusted to show off the compression artifacts.
A copy of the Google Earth image adjusted to show off the compression artifacts. Photo credit: Google Earth

Some YouTube users figured all this out, accusing MrMBB333 of intentionally making false claims for the ad revenue.

"It could be a steaming pile of mammoth excrement if he says it's a ufo people will click and he will get paid," said one viewer.

Most who commented on the video were convinced, however. 

"Absolutely artificial. Someone said that as the ice melted in Antarctica, we would begin to see ships reveal themselves and the Gov would have a very hard time explaining them away. Secrets purposefully kept from the public."

The pool of water, amongst other streams and pools in Antarctica.
The pool of water, amongst other streams and pools in Antarctica. Photo credit: Google Earth

Antarctica is losing ice, thanks to climate change - but that's about the only thing that appears to be true in this story.