Wildest Antarctica journeys to our coldest continent and southern seas. Shaped by ice-shelves, glaciers, and snow-capped volcanoes, Antarctica is a place of exceptional and formidable beauty.
#1 | 01/29/2019Currents
Antarctica is surrounded by the strongest ocean current on the planet, extending from the surface all the way to the sea floor. It's one of the many variables that keeps this continent isolated, as well as the coldest place on Earth. It creates pathways for polar inhabitants to travel to other shores and determines where marine life will migrate, mate, raise their young, and hunt.
#2 | 02/05/2019Seasons
The South Pole has just two seasons, summer and winter. The warmer months draw a myriad of wondrous animals to Antarctic waters. Winter transforms Antarctica into a vastly different place. The extreme weather forces animals to flee for warmer waters. The entire continent swells, and contracts. Blizzards set in, but on distant shores, the renewal of life, and the hunt, continues.
#3 | 02/12/2019Connected Continents
It's barely fathomable that all the land on Earth was once connected. Roughly 250 million years ago, the land masses we recognize as today's continents broke away from what is now the Antarctic and rode atop tectonic plates across the southern hemisphere. Clues to these ancient connections between the southern continents are hidden throughout the animal kingdom today.
#4 | 02/19/2019Icy Islands
The Antarctic continent contains 90% of all ice on the planet. Deep in the center, conditions are so extreme that few forms of life survive. Even on the coast, seals and penguins need to enter water to warm up, and flee when Antarctica is plunged into 24-hour darkness each winter. The sheer inhospitable nature of the continent means the icy islands that surround it play a vital role.
It covers a third of the world's surface. It is constantly reshaped by the clash of Earth's tectonic plates. It creates life, that in turn becomes the architect of underwater empires. Here, the world's most primitive life forms have outlived dinosaurs and found astonishing ways to adapt and survive in one of the most competitive environments on the planet. This is the Wildest Pacific.
Isolated and completely surrounded by water, Australia is a land of contrasts. Parched desert and tropical rainforest, islands, reefs, and bushland are shaped by seasons of drought, flood, and fire. Through it all, this continent has produced the most extraordinary survivors. Some have bloomed in unhindered remoteness over millions of years. Others remain unchanged since long before the ice age.