The award-winning Nature series is the longest-running weekly natural history series on television. PBS Nature takes you to the end of the Earth, and, below it. Program 1: Antarctica: The End of the Earth - How cold is it in stark and forbidding Antarctica? It is so brutally cold that even its summer residents, the well-dressed penguins, seem to be shutting their eyes and shivering. Nevertheless, this extended program gives you a full blast of this fierce, remote, and yet astonishingly beautiful place, exposing the mighty forces that have shaped both the continent and the rest of the Earth as well. It looks into the face of the Katabatic, the wind that decimates life, resets the landscape, and creates new weather. It also confronts the areas icy natives, the icebergs. These million-ton islands harbor an abundance of life forms but also hinder travel throughout the oceans, posing an in-the-dark danger to even huge ice-cutting ships. Finally, the program focuses on the scientists and explorers who, braving an otherworldly environment, go to the end of the Earth to learn more about our past and our future. Program 2: Under Antarctic Ice - Antarctica may be the worlds only frozen desert, but beneath the oxymoronic surface lays a huge body of stunningly cold and clear ocean water abounding with enchanting life forms and icescapes. Risking temperatures cold enough to freeze the blood, underwater filmmaker and photographer Norbert Wu takes a team down into the water to capture high-definition video pictures of this hidden world. Their adventure, narrated by Academy Award winner Hilary Swank, the team encounters creatures with electric features, jellyfish with 30-foot tentacles, sponges the size of large mammals, and gangs of ravenous seals, penguins, and killer whales. Sunlight leaks through cracks in the oceans crystalline ceiling, spotlighting some of the frozen waterfalls and other icy structures and revealing the fantastical nature of this beautiful world. In going Under Antarctic Ice, Wu brings you a part of the continent that even grizzled veterans of the place have never seen.
...The greatest cinematography on earth. --The New York Times