Planet Earth – Ice Worlds

Today on Discovery Enterprise we will join host David Attenborough in the sixth episode of the reward winning documentary series Planet Earth. In today’s instalment we will join Dr. Attenborough on an odyssey to the coldest and most inhospitable regions of our planet – the frigid wastelands of the Arctic and Antarctica. Yet, despite the fact that these regions are freezing and forbidding ice worlds, life manages to flourish here.

Snow petrels take their place on nunataks and begin to court, but are preyed on by South Polar skuas. During summer, a pod of humpback whales hunt krill by creating a spiralling net of bubbles. The onset of winter sees the journey of emperor penguins to their breeding grounds, 160 kilometres (99 mi) inland. Their eggs transferred to the males for safekeeping, the females return to the ocean while their partners huddle into large groups to endure the extreme cold. At the northern end of the planet, Arctic residents include musk oxen, who are hunted by Arctic foxes and wolves. A female polar bear and her two cubs head off across the ice to look for food. As the sun melts the ice, a glimpse of the Earth’s potential future reveals a male polar bear that is unable to find a firm footing anywhere and has to resort to swimming — which it cannot do indefinitely. Its desperate need to eat brings it to a colony of walrus. Although it attacks repeatedly, the herd is successful in evading it by returning to the sea. Wounded and unable to feed, the bear will not survive. Meanwhile, back in Antarctica, the eggs of the emperor penguins finally hatch. Planet Earth Diaries tells of the battle with the elements to obtain the penguin footage and of unwelcome visits from polar bears.

Planet Earth – Ice Worlds