Frozen Planet II

Episode
Episode 6 - Our Frozen Planet
Broadcast Info
2022 (58 mins)
Description
Frozen Planet II journeys to all of Earth’s remarkable cold worlds to experience the wonder of these breath-taking wildernesses at a time when they are changing before our eyes. Our frozen planet is changing. In this final episode, we meet the scientists and people dedicating their lives to understanding what these changes mean, not just for the animals and people who live there, but for the planet as a whole. Our journey begins in the Arctic, where every summer huge quantities of ice calve from the edges of Greenland’s melting glaciers. On top of the ice cap itself, glaciologist Alun Hubbard descends into a moulin to try and understand what the mechanisms that are driving this historic loss of ice.
Elsewhere in the Arctic, it’s not just land ice that is disappearing. In the Gulf of St Lawrence, Canada, biologists are trying to find out how the loss of sea ice will impact the lives of baby harps. In Arctic Russia, with the loss of summer sea ice, more and more polar bears are arriving on island of Wrangel. Here a local ranger and scientists are braving the hungry bears to assess their future survival. Loss of sea ice impacts, not just wildlife, but people too. In the remote community of Qaanaaq, Greenland, local Inuit hunters are finding the ice too dangerous to travel and hunt on, risking their traditional way of life. And these changes happening in the Arctic have the potential to affect people far beyond the Poles. On Alaska’s open tundra, bubbling lakes hint at the gases being released from the previously frozen soil: including the potent greenhouse gas methane. There is one place where the full scale of a melting Arctic can be best witnessed - from space. Based out of the International Space Station, astronaut Jessica Meir looks down at forest fires across Europe and reflects how our changing weather patterns are interconnected. Rapid ice loss is also happening across the high mountains of the planet’s continents. Glaciologist Hamish Pritchard uses a sophisticated helicopter-strung radar system to try and quantify how much ice is left in the previously uncharted glaciers of the Himalayas. It’s important as downstream, some 1.2 billion people rely on glacial meltwater as their primary source of fresh water. Finally, in Antarctica, we meet Bill Fraser who has dedicated 45 years of his life studying the Adelie penguin. Over this period, he has witnessed changes in weather conditions and the extinction of entire colonies. These ‘canaries in the coalmine’ are a sign that all is not well, even in the remotest place on earth. And changes here have the potential to affect all of us: an international group of scientists are on an urgent mission to assess the stability of a huge body of ice known as the Thwaites ice shelf. If this plug of ice melts and slips into the ocean, it will raise global sea levels, impacting coastal communities across the planet. These unprecedented changes our scientists are witnessing may be profound, but there is hope that, through a combination of technology and willpower, there is still time to save what remains of our frozen planet.
Genre
Research; Natural History; Climate

How to cite this record

The Open University, "Frozen Planet II". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/243340 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)