An online sleuth has posted images of what looks like a gigantic face rising out of the snow at the .

The Antarctic alien was spotted by a social media user who saw the image while looking at satellite imagery of the area on Earth. The image was posted on on Thursday in the r/strangeearth community, sparking debate among members. The image appears to show an otherworldly face with one half-closed eye, a nose and a mouth clearly visible in the image.

The face was spotted in the south-east region of continent, a desolate area called Oates Land, named after British explorer Lawrence Oates who famously died on the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition in 1912. The user posted the eerie image, adding: "Possible Face in Antarctica." They included the coordinates 72°00'36.0"S 168°34'40.0"E.

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Social media users were quick to liken the image to the famous “Face of Mars”, a similar looking image taken of the Martian surface by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976. This image also appears to show a face and commenters wondered if the two could be connected. “I’d be more impressed if it & the face on mars ever lined up so they looked at each other,” one user wrote.

Meanwhile others were much more sceptical. “This is peak pareidolia and happenstances. I don’t understand why this whole post is a thing at all,” said one. Pareidolia is a common psychological phenomenon where people see faces in random objects such as clouds or rock formations.

The image had previously been shared in 2019, causing commenters then to claim that it could be evidence of a civilisation living under the ice at the South Pole. Antarctica has long been a centre for alien conspiracies. In 2016 speculation ran wild online after satellite images of what appeared to be “pyramids” built on the white continent were circulated.

Most striking in particular was a black, snow-smeared tooth whose keen edges, slanted triangular faces, and sharp summit point bore a striking similarity to Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza - only instead of sand, the “structure” was surrounded by snow. This massive object was a roughly 2-square-kilometer, 4,150-foot peak in that southern, lower section of the Ellsworth Mountains. But geologists confirmed they were just regular mountain peaks that had been formed and shaped by glaciers and other natural processes.