Man Walks Through an Ice Cave In Antarctica — What He Saw Inside Is Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen

From the outside, Antarctica just looks like a massive sheet of ice, but beneath the glaciers, it hides secret worlds and fascinating life forms. Not everyone can visit the icy continent, and for those people, TikToker Matty Jordan (@mattykjordan) opens a window into the unseen. The 35-year-old is the “world’s most-followed Antarctican,” who has spent hundreds of days living in the continent as part of his job. During this stay, he recorded everything from sunny haloes to the breathing sounds of Antarctica. He experimented with frozen coke, made snow balls, poured boiling water on the ice, and even attached a $5000 camera to record a time-lapse video of the Antarctic Sun. In November 2024, he shared a video showing his surreal passage through a cave in Antarctica. The footage has amassed over 400,000 views.

Currently an international speaker, social media content creator, and Antarctican, Jordan spent 450 days in Antarctica across nine expeditions to the continent. He leverages his platform to inspire awareness and action for Antarctic conservation and environmental protection. In this footage, he depicted the metaphor of “moving towards the light” as he walked towards the mouth of an icy tunnel.

The 22-second footage revealed an otherworldly cavern of blue ice featuring rigged formations on the floor. The camera showed Jordan’s feet, clad in black shoes, stamping and parading atop this floor, making a crunchy sound. A far away point at the end of the tunnel looked like an opening from where light seemed to be seeping inside. As Jordan walked, the cavern took the form of a fantasy-like setting, with wavy streaks of ice dangling from the walls.  

The cave that he was walking through was "one of the many glacial caves inside the Erebus Glacier Tongue," Jordan later shared with Newsweek. According to NASA, the Erebus Glacier Tongue emanates from Mount Erebus, one of the most aggressive volcanoes of Antarctica. From this volcano, the glacier flows downhill, becoming a protrusion off the coast of Ross Island, forming a tongue of ice 6 to 7 miles thick. “Such formations develop when a glacier rapidly moves toward the sea, creating ice structures that float on water during the summer months and sometimes calve into small icebergs,” NASA explained.

Entering such a cave, Jordan told Newsweek, is a recreational activity that is offered to the staffers at Scott Base on their days off. "Antarctica has several ice caves," he said, "but around Ross Island where Scott Base is, the ice caves within the Erebus Glacier Tongue are the primary ones that we enter." People who watched his video were blown away, as usual, by the breathtaking beauty of Antarctica. Hundreds of them flooded the comments section with comments such as “amazing,” “super cool,” and “breathtaking.” “I love the sound of hardened snow,” @chilly said, while user @aecipeddirtycity cooked up a bizarre scenario and wrote, “What if there is an underground tunnel leading to an unknown continent in Antarctica?”

You can follow Matty Jordan (@mattykjordan) on TikTok for more glimpses of Antarctica.