Scientists pumped tons of cement into abandoned ant hill and discovered astonishing mega-city in earth

It's easy to forget about what lies beneath us when going about our day-to-day lives and a group of scientists were in for a big surprise after pumping concrete into a hill.

Rushing about every day back and forward to working, fretting about paying the bills and what you're having for dinner, it's easy to forget the little things in life - the nature around us and also what potentially lies beneath.

And when a team of scientists pumped 10 tons of concrete into an uninhabited ant hill, they got a pretty big shock.

Documentary Ants! Nature's Secret Power - available to watch on Amazon Prime - saw a group of scientists take to an abandoned ant hill across a period of three days to pump it full of concrete.

Why? To get a mould of an ant mega-city they discovered in the hill.

Little did they know just how impressive the structure really was until weeks of careful digging work to get the mould out.

The massive anthill had tunnels, chambers and even side roads. (ORF Enterprise)

The whole thing was 50 square metres in size and went down eight metres underground, creating a giant interconnected series of tunnels and chambers with different rooms for different purposes.

For ants wanting to get around while dodging most of their colleagues, there were even side roads for the insects to scuttle around in.

All of this might make you think it was constructed by one mind with a particular goal of how the mega-city should look, but it was instead constructed by 'the collective will of the ant colony'.

Right beneath the ground we walk on, thousands of little creatures were toiling together in the dark to scrabble out an incredibly complex construction.

Even more incredibly, while it took 10 tons of concrete to fill out the abandoned mega-city, experts estimated that the ants shifted a whopping 40 tons of dirt to clear out space for their home.

Clearing the mega-city out took weeks of digging just to uncover how big it really was. (ORF Enterprise)

You might be wondering just how they managed to do that and the answer is that ants are incredibly strong, able to carry between 10 and 50 times their own weight.

Their neck joints in particular can withstand pressure of up to 5,000 times the creature's own weight before giving way.

A big amount of dirt to shift requires a big workforce and with thousands of ants as a construction team this colony was able to construct themselves a mega-city.

However, with the experts discovering the place abandoned your next question might be why ants abandon a perfectly good anthill.

The ants had to move 40 tons of dirt to build the city, each trip was the equivalent of a human carrying four times their weight for a kilometre. (Darren Robb/Getty Images)

The most common reasons for a colony of ants to skedaddle from their carefully constructed mega-city beneath the ground is the danger posed either by predators or damaging disasters.

Anthills can be invaded by other ants or creatures that want to break in and feed on the insects larvae, while weather conditions can risk flooding the nest and rendering it unsafe.

If people mess with anthills the colony of insects inside can also get the message that they're not in a safe location, resulting in them upping sticks and moving.