Scientists baffled about unknown radio waves emanating from deep within Antarctica: “It’s an interesting problem”

In one of the most remote and quiet corners of Earth, a strange mystery is unfolding beneath the ice.

A NASA project called ANITA—short for Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna—has been listening for cosmic radio signals from high above Antarctica, far from the usual hum of human-made interference. Suspended from a balloon drifting 120,000 feet over the frozen continent, this experimental setup was designed to catch the faintest echoes of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays slamming into Earth’s atmosphere.

But instead, it found something no one was expecting.

Signals that break the rules of physics

Scientists analyzing ANITA’s data stumbled upon something truly puzzling: radio pulses coming from below the ice. These weren’t gentle, expected reflections of cosmic particles—these were bold, upward bursts, recorded at impossibly steep angles, sometimes 30 degrees below the horizon.

To produce signals like that, a particle would need to pass all the way through Earth—nearly 3,000 miles of solid rock—and emerge from the ice on the other side.

That should be impossible. No known particle has the ability to do that.

But the signals were real.

After extensive verification, scientists ruled out the possibility of instrumental errors. These upward radio pulses passed every filter and control they could devise, leaving researchers with only one conclusion: either our understanding of particle physics is incomplete, or something entirely new is happening beneath our feet.

Could ghost particles be to blame?

The likeliest suspects are neutrinos—elusive, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with matter. Often dubbed the “ghosts of the universe,” they constantly stream through space (and through us), largely unnoticed.

“You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment,” said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy, and astrophysics, and a leading scientist on the ANITA team. “But neutrinos don’t really interact. So, this is the double-edged sword problem,” she added.

“If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else,” she explained. “We could be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the observable Universe.”

And that is exactly what makes these detections so compelling.

If these signals really are from neutrinos, that would mean they traveled across the universe, pierced through the Earth without hitting anything, and only then triggered a detectable pulse as they exited.

The implications are enormous. It could mean we’re witnessing neutrinos from the edge of the observable universe—or something even more exotic.

What’s next: A new mission launches this december

More clues may arrive by the end of the year.

NASA is preparing to launch a new balloon mission in Antarctica called PUEO—short for Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations. Slated to fly this December, PUEO will carry more antennas and far more sensitive electronics than ANITA, boosting detection capabilities by at least a factor of five.

Scientists hope this upgraded mission will either confirm the anomalies or provide the data needed to explain them. Either way, the findings could rewrite our understanding of the cosmos.

The ongoing investigation and its early results have already been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

For now, the mystery remains. But the whispers rising from beneath the Antarctic ice are growing louder—and harder to ignore.