5 most underexplored places on planet Earth

1. Kankar Punsum

Location: Bhutan, on the border with Tibet.

Kankar Punsum is the 40th highest mountain in the world and the highest peak in Bhutan. It is still among the unconquered - in the snow on its top, 7,570 meters above sea level, no human foot has set foot.

The height of the mountain was first measured in 1922, but somehow, and until recently, maps in this region were extremely inaccurateS. K. Berry. The Thunder Dragon Kingdom: A Mountaineering Expedition To Bhutan.

Because of this, the first expedition of climbers, who decided to conquer Kankar-Punsum, could not find this damned mountain at all.

Several attemptsC. mason. A Short History of Asia climbing to the top, but they all ended in failure. In 1985, climbers from the UK started to climb, but fell ill and returned empty-handed.

In 1986, the Austrian team climbed the mountain, but they were stopped by the rainy season. In 1998, a Japanese expedition was given the right to climb, but the permit was later revoked due to a political conflict with Bhutan. So the summit remained unexplored.

Now the authorities of Bhutan have officially banned climbing Kankar Punsum because of the religious beliefs of the locals. It is believed that powerful spirits live there. And there is no need for any curious to climb up there and scatter used oxygen cylinders and packaging from chocolate bars.

2. Challenger Abyss

Location: Pacific Ocean, Mariana Trench, east of the Philippines.

Mariana Trench, or Mariana Trench, - the deepestMariana Trench / Britannica place on planet earth. Its maximum known depth is estimated at 10,984 meters. This point is named after the British ship HMS Challenger, which, in fact, discovered the depression in 1951.

First time in the Challenger Abyss went downT. Merritt. Chronology of Tech History oceanographers Jacques Picard and Don Walsh on the Trieste manned submersible in January 1960. Then in 1996, 1998 and 2009 unmanned probes dived there.

In March 2012, James Cameron, known to all of us, sailed there alone on the Deepsea Challenger, filmed a documentary, and also helped discover a new type of sea cucumber.

And in 2020, the Russian robotic apparatus Vityaz-D was sent into the abyss.

But despite the fact that both unmanned and manned expeditions on submersibles have been repeatedly made to the Mariana Trench, it remains one of the most mysterious places on the planet.

Diving there is associated with huge difficultiesA. Macdonald. Life at High Pressure: In the Deep Sea and Other Environments, because at the bottom of the trench a column of water creates a gigantic pressure - more than 1,071 atmospheres.

3. North Sentinel Island

Location: Andaman archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean.

The Andaman archipelago is located between Burma and Indonesia, it includes about 200 islands. One of them, located at a distance from the others, is called the Northern Sentinel. On an island of 60 square kilometers, approximately datav. Pandya. In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858-2006)lives from 15 to 400 people. The exact numbers are unknown, as the locals are not inclined to receive visitors.

The Sentinelese are a very isolated tribe. For 30 thousand years they lived without any interaction with the outside world.

The inhabitants of the island are familiar with fire, but unknownThrough Lens and Text: Constructions of a ‘Stone Age’ Tribe in the Andaman Islands / History Workshop Journalwhether they know how to extract it - they have an intricate procedure for preserving smoldering coals in clay pots. The Sentinelese build canoes, fish, gather plants. The tribe is familiar with bows, arrows and spears, and with them they aggressively drive away helicopters flying past the island.

In 2018 American missionary John Allen Zhao sailedAmerican ‘killed in India by endangered Andamans tribe’ / BBC News to the island to save the souls of the unfortunate savages by converting them to Christianity. The Sentinelese did not appreciate the care and shot dead archery priest. Prior to that, in 2006, they killed two Indian fishermen who fished in local waters. By the way, the Sentinelese do not engage in cannibalism, and the bodies of the dead are buried in shallow graves.

Approaching the island is prohibited by the Indian government, as it threatens the safety of both visitors and the inhabitants of Sentinel. They have no immunity to diseases carried by the inhabitants of the surrounding world, and contact is likely to destroy the tribe.

So North Sentinel Island remains unexplored and will be so for a very long time.

4. Guiana tepui

Location: Guiana Peninsula, Venezuela.

Tepui, or tepui, - mesasBiogeography of the Lost World (Pantepui region, northeastern South America): Insights from bryophytes / Phytotaxa, most of which are located in the Venezuelan Canaima National Park. The word is in the language of the Indians of the Pemon tribe means "house of the gods."

These mountains stand isolated from each other above the jungle, and each of them is home to unique endemic species of animals and plants. 200 million years ago, tepui formed a single plateau, but later tectonic processes split them into separate parts. They were discovered by the German explorer Robert Schomburgk in 1835.

It was Robert Schomburgk's expedition reports that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, about a plateau inhabited by dinosaurs.

True, on real tepui dinosaurs does not seem to be fixed. But on these high plateaus, densely covered with forests, grow many thousands of species of orchids, bromeliads and a wide variety of insectivorous plants that have not yet been described by science.

The nature of each individual tepui is unique. For exampleInside the lost cave world of the Amazon's tepui mountains / New Scientist, one of the mountains, Roraima-tepui, is the only known habitat of the Roraima bush toad. This little amphibian has a strange defense mechanism: in the face of danger, it curls up into a ball and rolls away.

Tepui relief makes climbBBC Two announces epic adventure series with Steve Backshall / BBC Media Center on them is extremely difficult. In addition, in the jungles of Guiana dropsA journey into the world's oldest and most puzzling caves / TED an average of 4,000 millimeters of precipitation per year. Due to such weather, the chance to reach the tops of the tepui is very rare.

But if rare research expeditions were nevertheless made in the jungle on the mesas of Venezuela and drones flew, then here are the systems cavesInside the lost cave world of the Amazon's tepui mountains / New Scientist and karst funnels, which are penetrated by tepui, have been studied much less.

These are even more mysterious places than the forests above. The quartz walls here have an eerie pinkish hue, organic acids in the water turn the streams red or yellowish. Their waters are inhabited by hitherto unknown and not described by science prehistoric species of blind cave fish, amphibians and bacteria. Also, there are natural mineralsRossiantonite, Al3(PO4)(SO4)2(OH)2(H2O)10 4H2O, a new hydrated aluminum phosphate-sulfate mineral from Chimanta massif, Venezuela: Description and crystal structure / American Mineralogist, found nowhere else in the world.

However, due to the inaccessibility of tepui, researchers are unable to properly study jungle on their top and caves hidden in the depths. It is not known whether the mesas of Venezuela will ever become more accessible to us.

5. Subglacial Lake Vostok

Location: near the station "Vostok", Antarctica.

For the first time, subglacial lakes in Antarctica discoveredA large deep freshwater lake beneath the ice of central East Antarctica / Nature expedition of the Soviet geographer Andrey Kapitsa - in 1959 by the method of seismic sounding. Later, the results of his scan were confirmed by the British, who conducted radar surveys from the air. Currently, a total of 400 hidden reservoirs are known, most of which have not been explored.

The largest and most mysterious among them is Lake Vostok, named after the sloop of war, as is the polar station of the same name. 15 million years ago it was is hiddenLake Vostok drilling in Antarctic 'running out of time' / BBC News from the outside world in thick layers of ice. The water there is supersaturated with nitrogen and oxygen and is under a huge pressure of 350 atmospheres.

There, in eternal darkness, unique microorganisms live, isolated from the world and found nowhere else.

The situation in Lake Vostok more similarA hundred meters from the mystery / Around the World on the conditions of the subglacial oceans of Europa, the satellite of Jupiter, or Enceladus, the moon of Saturn. But there is an invisible life there. So, it is quite possible that a biosphere can be found in space.

Studying the ecosystem of Lake Vostok helps to understand how microorganisms extremophilesIsolation of bacteria and 16S rDNAs from Lake Vostok accretion ice / PubMed can survive even where it would seem unthinkable. Nevertheless, research is progressing hard, because the reservoir hard to reachLake Vostok drilling in Antarctic 'running out of time' / BBC News due to the depth and thickness of the ice. In addition, there is a risk of polluting the waters of the lake with surface microbes and destroying the unique ecosystem.