Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible response

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Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible response
Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible response

A British explorer has found a whole building buried under the ice in one of the most remote places on earth.

Chris Brown recently hit the headlines after sharing his terrifying ordeal when travelling to Antarctica with his son, Mika, 28, as the pair got “trapped” in -28°C conditions after their plane broke down. The dad-of-two from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, often shares discoveries from his wild adventures and has gone viral this week with a video that has already attracted more than 20,000 views.

The clip shared online (@chrisbrownexplores) has blown social media users' minds as Chris shares the fact that there is a whole building buried in Antarctica. The only clue to this unique find? A giant bust of the former Russian leader, Vladimir Lenin, poking out of the snow and ice in the remotest part of Antarctica, known as the Pole of Inaccessibility. And there’s some funny history to the statue’s positioning, too.

Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible response eiqrtiqzeiqzzinvChris Brown in Antarctica with the bust of Lenin (Jam Press/Chris Brown)
Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible responseChris Brown and his son, Mika, revealing a whole building buried under ice in Antarctica (Jam Press Vid/Chris Brown)

Chris, 62, who documents his adventures on Chris Brown Explores and Inaccessibility.net, said: “The Lenin bust is on top of a wooden plinth, none of the rest of the building is visible because it's under ice. When the Russians put it there, they positioned his face so he was looking towards Moscow. But apparently, a couple of American explorers who visited the site several years after it had been abandoned by the Russians, turned it around so it faced Washington. Not long after that, the Russians sent an expedition back out there and turned it round so it was facing Moscow again.”

Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible responseAn unidentified object at the southern pole of inaccessibility (Jam Press/Chris Brown)
Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible responseChris Brown with Virgin boss Richard Branson (Jam Press/Chris Brown)

In the TikTok video Chris shared a slideshow of images from the discovery. He notes the bust was found on the pair’s trip to the historic Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility in January 2023. He also shows a photo of the “unburied” version of the artefact, leaving viewers shocked. I was not expecting it to be THAT buried,” one person said. Someone else added: “There’s an entire building under the bust????” [sic].

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The statue sits atop an old Soviet Union meteorological research station which was built in 1958. Three quarter of the base of it have now been entirely buried beneath the ice and snow. But some of the bust’s attributes remain a mystery.

Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible responseChris shared a slideshow of images from the discovery in his video (Jam Press/Chris Brown)

Chris added: “When we got there we had quite good weather. It was only -30°C, whereas the average temperature at that location is -58°C so we spent quite a lot of time looking at it. And on top of the wooden plinth there is a cable attached with a screw on the very top, and similarly, there is a screw on the front face and on the side face and they are all joined together with cables. I was wondering what this is, bearing in mind it originated from the height of the Cold War and the Russians were probably fed up with the Americans turning it back to face Washington all the time. I wondered what those cables were, and what would have happened if we tried to open up that wooden box.”

Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible responseChris stranded in an Antarctica snow blizzard (Jam Press Vid/Chris Brown)

Chris, who has embarked on a quest to be the first person to visit all seven of the world’s land-based Poles of Inaccessibility, has almost succeeded in reaching five of the Poles so far, including being the first person ever to the African Pole – with only sites in the Arctic and Eurasia (North West China ) remaining.

Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible responseChris Brown and his son, Mika, revealing a whole building buried under ice in Antarctica (Jam Press Vid/Chris Brown)
Brit explorer finds entire building buried under ice and has incredible responseChris shared the geographic co-ordinates with his followers (Jam Press Vid/Chris Brown)

He set himself the mammoth task after getting to know other explorers, including second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, and Hamish Harding, the billionaire who perished on the Titan submersible’s voyage to the wreck of the Titanic, at the regular South Pole in 2016.

Graeme Murray

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