Planet Earth part two - press pack
Programme one: Planet Earth - Ice Worlds
Planet Earth returns with a journey to the polar extremes of our planet where
most of the year the Arctic and Antarctic are locked in ice.
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As the sun
abandons one pole and journeys to the other, these frozen worlds undergo the
most extreme seasonal transformation on the planet –
from the total darkness
and numbing temperatures of the polar winter to the midnight sun of the summer,
when the sun never sets.
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Following in the footsteps of the great polar explorers, Planet Earth takes
high-definition cameras into the most remote wildernesses on the planet.
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With
the help of Royal Navy helicopters on board HMS Endurance, the 91Èȱ¬ teams capture,
from the air, incredible shots of humpback whales feeding.
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Simultaneously, a
dive team films the whales from under the water revealing how they create a net
of bubbles in which to catch their shrimp-like prey.
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At the end of the Antarctic summer, the sun abandons the pole and heads north.
The sea around the continent freezes and the ice expands, doubling the size of
Antarctica.
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While all other life flees north, the emperor penguins are just
arriving. For more than nine months Planet Earth follows these hardy birds as they
trek across the sea ice to breed.
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The high technology time-lapse cameras reveal
behaviours new to science, as the colony is transformed into a dynamic, single
organism.
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When the sun arrives in the Arctic, this frozen ocean encircled by continents
begins to change.
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A male polar bear has spent the winter out on the sea ice,
hunting for seals, but now his ice world is literally melting away beneath him.
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Planet Earth captures unique images from the air of the male bear swimming more than
100 kilometres in search of ice from which to hunt seals.
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Diving for up to two
minutes at a time, he reveals his true marine nature –
a bear as at home in
water as on land.
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Finally, driven by hunger, he arrives at an island where a
colony of walruses has landed to breed. In desperation, he takes them on and
after a true battle of giants comes off the worst.
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And, two years on, Planet Earth catches up with the two cubs that were filmed
emerging from their den for the start of the series.
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Independent from their
mother, they are now facing incredible survival challenges as climate change
transforms the planet's ice worlds.
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Producer: Vanessa Berlowitz
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Planet Earth Diary
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Ice Worlds - Alive In The Freezer
By producer Vanessa Berlowitz
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Australian cameraman Wade Fairley and his partner Frederique Olivier spent a
whole year living in Antarctica to film a breeding colony of 20,000 emperor
penguins.
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91Èȱ¬ was little more than a packing container perched on tiny Macey
Island surrounded by miles of sea ice.
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Wade's biggest challenge was to film the male penguins as they huddled together
to keep warm, their precious eggs tucked away in a warm pouch above their feet,
with temperatures crashing to minus 60 degrees centigrade.
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Crawling on his knees just to reach the colony, Wade was rewarded with amazing
images of the penguins facing the harshest weather conditions imaginable. Only
a handful of humans have ever witnessed these scenes.
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Two months later, Frederique found a downy young chick stuck in a hole under the
ice. Penknife in hand, she chipped away at the ice and managed to pull the
chick free.
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At the other end of the Earth, cameraman Doug Allan and assistant Jason Roberts were the first people to set foot in the Norwegian Arctic for over a quarter of
a century.
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But Kong Karls Land was "bear nirvana", according to Doug.
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On the first day the crew had a visitor –
a large male polar bear that had
never seen a human, and certainly had no fear. After failing to ward it off
with fire crackers, Jason had to resort to a flare gun.
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The team had to move their gear the old fashioned way –
on sledges –
which made
them more vulnerable to the curious bears.
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Their goal was to film the first
emergence of a mother and her cubs from the bear's den.
After four weeks of waiting, they managed to capture the most moving and
amazing images of the polar bear and her new family emerging into their frozen
world.
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