BBC Frozen Planet - a glistening wilderness beyond imagination #FrozenPlanet

Frozen Planet, 26th October 2011, 9pm BBC One.

It's one of the most beautiful places on the planet and yet few people have been, or are even able to visit. It's the remote polar regions - splendid, harsh, brutal, beautiful. I was lucky enough to spend a month filming in a remote valley on Svalbard for the series Life - it was a profound experience. For four weeks the sun never set and the harsh polar wind blasted us from all sides threatening to steal our tents, we scaled huge sheets of ice and hiked up glacial streams - it was the first time that I've felt like a true explorer, and yet I was there in the summer! 

My colleagues in the Natural History Unit have just spent the best part of three years filming in these brutal landscapes for the series Frozen Planet, they faced some of the last great frontiers on earth to bring home magnificence and awe. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, Frozen Planet will whisk you away to a glistening alien world where giants roam and the earth creaks - Polar Bears, Narwhals, Elephant Seals, these are animals and landscapes that fuel the imagination. Even though most of us live in a seemingly disconnected world our everyday actions do have a profound effect on their future in this barren wilderness. The final two episodes of Frozen Planet explore our relationship with the ends of the earth. From explorers and indigenous people to scientists unlocking the secrests hidden in the ice. Some regions, like the Antarctic Peninsula, have warmed significantly in the years since Sir David Attenborough first visited them. In episode 7 'On Thin Ice' he explores what this means, not just for the animals and people of the polar regions, but for the whole planet.

Not since 1993 and 'Life in the Freezer' have we seen a series on the poles as ambitious as this. You may think that it's just going to be another series about polar bears and penguins, but believe me this is going to be a landmark event in television history.

Gob-Smacked
I'm fortunate to have seen a preview of this epic series and it left me gob-smacked. Nothing can prepare you for the splendor of Mt Erebus, Antarctica's only continuously active volcano. It's fuming neck pokes up 12,448 feet above the endless white landscape, its ferocity betraying an inner beauty that few have ever seen until now. At the end of episode one, Freeze Frame takes us behind the scences, revealing the multiple crews and cameras that were needed to film Erebus from the air, from inside the caves and from under the icy waters. The aerial crew had to wait eight weeks to get a clear view of the top of the volcano - it was worth every minute.

Even though I work in wildlife TV some sequences left me in awe of the shear accomplishment of filming the behaviour. My personal highlight is the whale hunting sequence. It reveals how orcas work together to make giant waves, which over several hours wash seals from their ice floes and to their deaths (watch the clip below).

One of the most unbelievable moments in the entire series is the brinicle formation. A simple explanation is that a brinicle is like a finger of ice that reaches down from the frozen sea surface, when it touches the sea floor it freezes everything around it. It blew my mind, not only how incredible the phenomenon is, but also how on earth it was filmed. You can find this out first hand, and see some images on the website of cameraman Doug Anderson.

 

Find out more on the Frozen Planet website.

Watch an extended trailer here.

David Attenborough at the Poles
David Attenborough travelled to both polar regions in the making of the series. He first visited Antarctica 17 years ago, but this was his first time ever to visit the geographical North Pole. To get there, meant flying in to a Russian ice camp on the frozen Arctic ocean, where he could (after several days of bad weather) finally reach the pole itself by helicopter.

He also returned to Scott's hut, a place he first visited several years ago, but still touches him today. This is the place where Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his men began their fateful journey to reach the geographical South Pole. "I remember very vividly indeed the first time I entered this extraordinary building…it was not like any other place - because it isn't like any other place on earth. If ever there was a place that held the personality of the people that had lived in it, a century ago, this surely must be it".

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