Frozen Planet II - Filming locations, wildlife and behind the scenes secrets - BBC

Published: 6 September 2022

In 2011, Frozen Planet gave BBC viewers an unprecedented insight into life in the Poles. Now, 11 years later, Frozen Planet II – presented by Sir David Attenborough – returns to the Arctic and Antarctic to observe the amazing species that thrive there.

But, going further than Series 1, it also explores life beyond the Poles – witnessing the wildlife dramas that play out in all the world’s coldest regions: our high mountains, frozen deserts, snowbound forests, and ice-cold oceans.

These are the last true wildernesses on earth; places so challenging for survival that only a heroic cast of animals can live here. From polar bears to penguins, Siberian tigers to snow monkeys, each species must overcome unique challenges to survive their extreme environments.

Filmed in ultra-high definition using the very latest camera technology, and featuring dramatic new behaviours, intimate stories, and sensational natural spectacles filmed for the very first time, this six-part series is a chance to experience the wonder of our planet’s frozen realms as they stand on the brink of major change.

As temperatures rise at an unprecedented rate our frozen planet is literally vanishing before our eyes. The series reveals the true impact on both wildlife and humans. We meet scientists who’ve dedicated 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.

Frozen Planet II is made by BBC Studios’ world-renowned Natural History Unit, co-produced by BBC America, the Open University, Migu Video, ZDF and France Televisions.

Episode 1 – Frozen Worlds
Episode 2 – Frozen Ocean
Episode 3 – Frozen Peaks
Episode 4 – Frozen South
Episode 5 – Frozen Lands
Episode 6 – Our Frozen Planet

Q&A With Mark Brownlow, Executive Producer

Sir David Attenborough sits in a chair, looking at a scene of a frozen wilderness while filming for Frozen Planet II

How did Frozen Planet II come about?

I was the Series Producer of Blue Planet II and the big question that followed was… what should we do next? We’d just done Planet Earth II, which covered life across the world’s continents, as well as Seven Worlds, One Planet. We also did the big exploration of the underwater world, but what we felt was missing was a follow-up to the other big hit of its day, Frozen Planet. When we air this autumn it will be nearly eleven years since the original series first broadcast. So we felt that now was the time to re-examine, re-explore and celebrate life in our frozen regions.

The other thing is that I loved the original Frozen Planet series. As documentary makers we want to surprise the audience every episode and ring the changes. Whilst there’s a huge opportunity to apply new storytelling techniques and go with new filming technology to the Poles, I also felt that we could broaden out the series to really surprise the audience with the breadth and variety of all the different frozen worlds scattered across our globe. Remarkably, at any given time, a fifth of our planet is covered in snow or blanketed in ice. There is an opportunity to tell a much bigger of the frozen zone of the planet.

And particularly now, because this is the fastest changing region on Earth due to human-caused climate change. We felt that there was a universal film to be made that was contemporary, fresh and had real relevance, linked in to the audience’s greater consciousness around climate change. If we could do a series that celebrates first and foremost the wonder and magic of our frozen worlds, we could also surprise them with the variety and the heroic stories of survival across all of these different frozen areas at a time when they’re changing rapidly.

A changing frozen planet is a recurrent theme in the series. Can you tell us a bit more?

In the series we celebrate the frozen planet through wildlife, engaging the audience with animal stories and magical settings that will enthral them. I also wanted to show what changes had taken place in these regions while we were filming the series.

With the help of scientists we installed ruggedized time lapse cameras at the top of Quelccaya in the Andes, and down in Rothera in Antarctica, as well as up in Svalbard in the Arctic. We’ve positioned time lapse cameras long term to show the change taking place on our watch. We have also commandeered satellites to capture these changes from space, to get the bigger picture.

With this time study I really hope we can land the scale of the change that’s taking place, how rapidly this change is taking place, and what the implications are for the localised, highly cold-adapted animals. And, as we learn in episode six, how these changing worlds are also impacting all of us. In essence, it will show why we are more closely connected to these highly remote regions than perhaps we first appreciated.

I hope people will feel that, while this is a wonderful celebration and an opportunity to be transported to these magical worlds, at the same time there is a fierce contemporary relevance to these stories.

How do you maintain a balance between due concern and wide-eyed wonder?

This is something we have to get right. Highly charged films about climate change have their place but I feel that if you make it too weighty and too heavy going, you could alienate your audience.

As with Blue Planet II, I hope the audience will come to Frozen Planet II because they are enthralled by the storytelling and get gripped by the epic dramas, and some comedy too, in each film as we let them enjoy the majesty of the landscapes and the beauty of the animals found there.

At the same time we don’t want this to be just pure entertainment. People, I believe, have to know the context. So it’s getting the balance between the wonder and joy and entertainment within each episode with enough contemporary context around the changes that are taking place. It’s a fine balance but I think we’ve got it right.

Is there still hope for our frozen planet?

In the series we have the scientists at the end saying, very clearly, that it’s not too late. There’s still time, we can still protect these frozen regions and the wonderful wildlife within them but we do need to change our ways. Hopefully that’s an empowering message.

Q&A with Elizabeth White, Series Producer

A Polar bear rests on the ice in the high Arctic. Its reflection is visible in the water.

What is the overarching narrative of Frozen Planet II?

I was an Assistant Producer and a director on the original Frozen Planet.

That series was very much about life in the polar regions and it was a seasonal story. Frozen Planet II is a broader remit. We are looking at anywhere that is significantly cold for multiple months of the year. This is what scientists call the cryosphere – any region of the planet where water is locked up as ice and snow.

The premise of this series is to showcase a variety of these beautiful, cold worlds, and show the challenges that animals face, or overcome, in order to live in what can seem to us quite remote and hostile worlds. In each episode there are also stories where the animals’ challenge is the fact that their world is melting away. In that sense we’ve done a more contemporary take than the original series.

What’s the structure of Frozen Planet II?

The first episode sets up these worlds and the fact that they’re perhaps more varied than you might imagine. It also explains why these regions are cold.

The following four episodes are all very different. Frozen Ocean focuses on the Arctic Ocean, the shape-shifting world of ice and water and all life that either lives on or under that sea ice. Frozen Peaks is about mountains and cold regions created by altitude rather than latitude. Frozen South is effectively the story of Antarctica as a continent starting on the sub-Antarctic islands, and then down all around the fringes of the continent and then finally to reveal life hiding under the ice. Frozen Lands is about the northern lands – the tundra and the seasonal forests. And the last episode – Our Frozen Planet – is effectively a science film. In this episode all the stories are told through scientists or indigenous people who live or work in these cold regions.

So is there room for hope?

The last film is a very powerful watch. I think that anybody who knows anything about these regions will probably say the situation is bleak in many ways. But what we’ve tried to set up from the beginning is that these people are striving to turn things around before it’s too late. And in the final messages of this series we are trying to inject a sense of hope. We’ve got scientists talking about the fact that at our fingertips we do have the technology to be using renewables, to be transforming society, and that there is the will. The will is greater now than ever. What’s so powerful is that it comes from the scientists themselves. These are people who literally, day by day, see the ice disappearing but they still have hope that we can do something about this.

What is Sir David Attenborough’s role in that final film?

We open the series with David on camera facing an enormous image of the planet on screen talking about satellite imagery from space, and how some of these regions are so remote that this is the only way to really see them. Then in the last episode we feature him in the studio watching the film. It’s a little bit like you’re sitting next to David watching the film with him or almost like an intimate view of the series through his eyes.

What is the scale of Frozen Planet II?

By the time the series airs we will have been in production for at least four and a half years. We’d been in production for nearly two years when the pandemic struck, which was in one way quite lucky, because we’d done a lot of our filming beforehand. After the pandemic hit, a lot of the Canadian Arctic and Antarctic bases basically shut down.

It’s a lot of filming but we have tried to be incredibly strategic because one of the things which was really important for us was to try and work as sustainably as we could. We’ve actually tried to reduce the number of shoots we’ve done, tried to work with local teams wherever we could, or effectively piggyback so we could film one story in one place and immediately film something nearby.

Biographies

Mark Brownlow – Executive Producer, Frozen Planet II

Mark is a multiple Bafta and Emmy award-winning executive producer with over twenty-five years of programming experience across a broad range of wildlife TV documentaries and with a passion for the oceans. As series producer of ‘Blue Planet II’, he employed ground-breaking technology and environmental storytelling to give an entirely new understanding of life beneath the waves. Blue Planet II went on to become the most watched wildlife TV programme of all time and was credited with galvanising action around ocean plastics. As Executive Producer of ‘Frozen Planet II’, he has led the vision for the series and ventured to Antarctica to direct the ‘wave-washing’ killer whales. Other credits include Executive Producer of ‘Eden: Untamed Planet’, ‘Earth’s Tropical Islands’ and Series Producer of ‘Hidden Kingdoms’.

Elizabeth White – Series Producer, Frozen Planet II

Elizabeth White is the Series Producer of Frozen Planet II. A Bafta and Emmy award-winning producer and director with 18 years’ experience with the BBC Natural History Unit. She has a passion for cold places, having started life as a research biologist working in polar and marine environments. She has a strong creative vision and proven track record of producing cinematic content with intimate storytelling. Her film, Islands, for the series Planet Earth II, drew the highest audience figures for a Natural History show for 15 years. Its sequence, Snakes v Iguanas, became an internet sensation and won the publicly voted ‘TV moment of the year’. Elizabeth has worked across a range of BBC output: from presenter-led shows for the strand Wild, to landmark blue-chip productions such as The Great British Year, and the original Frozen Planet.

Frozen Planet II in Numbers

King penguin chicks, with their brown downy feathers, awaiting their parents return on a snow-covered beach in South Georgia

The Frozen Planet II team completed 102 shoots across the series.
Of these, 31 shoots were directed remotely using local crews.
The series involved 2188 filming days in the field across three years.
Filming happened on every continent, across 18 different countries, all around Antarctica and in space.
The longest continuous time any team member spent on location was three months. The longest journey to location took three weeks, and the longest quarantine period (due to COVID) was 42 days.

Technology

A drone is launched to film a calving event on Store glacier in western Greenland.

Drones

Drones allowed filming both of landscape and an aerial view of animal behaviour in remote places.

Light-weight drones enabled an aerial perspective on animal behaviour in situations where other aerial filming would have been disturbing to wildlife or logistically impossible;
GPS-programmed drones were used to fly specific routes multiple times to capture changes in the landscape over time, even years, and reveal seasonal changes on the sea ice;
High speed FPV (first-person view) ‘racer’ drones were deployed in order to fly down mountains alongside avalanches for the very first time in a TV documentary;
Thermal drones were used to follow pumas hunting at night and enable the ground team to get into position;

High-definition remote camera traps

New 4K remote camera traps were employed across multiple locations where animals were too secretive to be filmed from a hide, including the giant Siberian tiger, the secretive Amur leopard and the wild giant pandas roaming the snow-covered forest scent marking trees as they search for food and potential mates.

Long term time-lapse cameras

Ruggedised timelapse cameras were deployed to glaciers across the world so that the team could document changes in ice over the course of filming. Locations include Svalbard, Antarctica, Greenland, and the Quelccaya glacier in the Peruvian Andes.

Timelapse and lapsed time from high altitude and space

The Frozen Planet II team worked with space imaging experts and scientists to document changes happening all across our frozen planet from space. For instance they used repeated photography from satellites to timelapse moulins forming on the Greenland ice sheet, document glaciers flowing and retreating in Greenland and South Georgia and sea ice disappearing during summer in the Arctic.

Old photographs of glaciers were used to compare to what they look today. Revisiting locations to match-frame and then blending between images the series reveals profound changes in glaciers from South Georgia and the European Alps.

Rebreather diving technology and pole cameras

Rebreathers don’t produce bubbles and are less disturbing to wildlife. They were crucial across all underwater sequences. For instance this allowed camera teams to get more intimate footage of harp seal pups learning to swim and Weddell seals interacting underwater. They also allow divers to stay underwater for longer periods of time which was critical in locations severely restricted by extreme weather.

Where conditions were too dangerous to dive, specialist pole cameras were designed and deployed allowing the camera operators to remain safely on the surface, yet film below it. These were also used around unpredictable animals.

Episode 1 – Frozen Worlds

An adult emperor penguin walks away from its chick in Antarctica.

Frozen Worlds showcases the variety of cold habitats on Earth, explores why they are cold, and examines the incredible ways in which animals have overcome the challenges of survival there.

In this episode we begin our journey in the frozen continent of Antarctica in the far south, the most hostile place on Earth. After being raised on the ice in winter, in spring emperor penguin chicks find themselves abandoned by their parents. To survive they must find their own way across the treacherous sea ice to the rich waters of the Southern Ocean.

The waters surrounding Antarctica may be the richest of all but they also home to the killer whale, an exceptionally sophisticated predator. To reach Weddell seals – their favoured prey – a family of killer whales have learnt to generate their own waves, washing the seals off their ice floes. ‘Wave-washing’ is a technique that has been passed down over generations and is coordinated by the family matriarch who can be over 100 years old.

Leaving Antarctica and traveling north, we discover frozen habitats that are created by altitude. The greatest of these is the Himalaya – the tallest mountain range on earth. It contains so much ice and snow it is known as the ‘third pole’. In the shadow of the Himalaya lies a vast frozen grassy plain that is home to the Pallas’s cat, also known as the grumpiest cat. It may have extremely dense fur but, if it’s to survive the Mongolian winter, it needs to catch lots of gerbils and voles. Easier said than done when you only have short legs and paws sensitive to the cold.

North of the Great Steppe lies the boreal forest which encircles the continents of North America, Europe and Asia and remains frozen for six months of the year. Prowling these forests in the Far East of Russia is the Siberian tiger, the largest cat in the world. In winter it is on the lookout for black bears hibernating in caves, a high-risk strategy that only a cat of this size would attempt.

Above the boreal forest we cross into the Arctic Circle where conditions become so extreme that trees can no longer grow. This is the tundra. The musk ox – a relic of the last ice age – lives here. In spring their calves must face a far greater danger than the cold. Encounters with grizzly bears can be brutal but if just a few calves survive, the herd’s future is secure.

To the north of the tundra is the Arctic Ocean, the only ocean that can completely freeze over. Living here is the hooded seal, one of the most peculiar animals on Earth. Males have extraordinary inflatable noses producing a bright red balloon out of their left nostrils; something one male hopes will make him irresistible.

All of the frozen habitats share one thing in common – the threat posed by today’s climate change. Greenland is home to the largest body of ice in the northern hemisphere. Traveling there we witness how global warming is melting its icecap at faster rates than ever before with profound consequences for global sea levels. And lastly we meet the polar bear, the Arctic’s most iconic resident, as a mother struggles to provide for her cubs in a world of shrinking sea ice.

Key Species and Stories

A male Hooded seal inflates a membrane in his left nostril creating a red balloon.

Emperor penguin, Atka Bay (Neumayer Station), Antarctica

Due to an outbreak of Covid in their quarantine hotel in South Africa, the crew had to quarantine for over 40 days before they could travel to Antarctica to film the emperor penguins. The delay meant they only had ten days to complete the sequence, all the time working on sea ice that was breaking up due to the spring melt. To film the penguins first swim the crew spent up to nine hours a day in water that was -1°C.

Killer whale, Antarctic Peninsula

‘Wave-washing’ involves multiple individuals swimming in tandem and then coordinating their tail beats to create waves which then go on to wash seals off ice floes. Family groups are led by matriarchs who can live to be over hundred years old. Only about 100 killer whales in the Antarctic peninsula use this complex hunting technique.

The only other time that the wave-washing killer whales have been filmed creating waves to knock prey off ice floes was when the BBC made the original Frozen Planet series.

For the first time Frozen Planet II films this incredible behaviour using drones from an aerial perspective, allowing the team to see how the whales coordinated their attack from the air.

Pallas’s cat, The Great Steppe, Mongolia

The Pallas’s cat has the densest fur of any cat which allows them to stay warm through the harsh Mongolian winter.

To film the Pallas’s cat the production team had to sit completely stationary in wooden hides for up to eight hours a day. It was so cold their sandwiches froze solid.

Siberian tiger, East Siberia, Russia

Even though tigers are the biggest of all the big cats they are incredibly wary, choosing often to walk behind the camera traps that were deployed to film them. It took over three years to finally capture them patrolling their huge 700 square mile territories on the hunt for black bears.

Musk Ox, Nunavut, Canada

Musk oxen give birth during spring just as grizzly bears emerge from hibernation, posing a great danger to their calves. At this time of year it can be light for almost 24 hours a day so, in order to film the herd, the lone camera operator followed it around the clock on his Skidoo, only taking short breaks to sleep. After three weeks he eventually filmed the predation event, which only lasted for just over two minutes.

Hooded seal, Greenland Sea

The hooded seal can inflate a large balloon like sac from its left nostril. This is done by shutting one nostril valve and inflating a membrane which then protrudes from the other nostril. It is the only animal to perform this extraordinary behaviour.

Polar bear, Russia and Svalbard, Norway

Some polar bears, as seen in this episode, use a technique known as ‘aquatic-stalking’ in which they sneak up on their prey and ambush from the water.

Calving glacier, Store glacier – Greenland

A whole fleet of light-weight fast-response drones were used to document ice calving from Store glacier in Greenland – a fast and ephemeral event.

This is the first time drones have been used in such a way to capture a full calving sequence for television. Aerial filming of glaciers has usually been done by helicopter.

Filming Locations

A Mongolian gerbil comes out of his burrow to forage.

Emperor penguins – Atka Bay Antarctica
Killer whales and Weddell seals – Antarctic peninsula, Antarctica
Aerial scenic – Karakoum Mountains, Skardu, Pakistan
Pallas’s cat, Mongolian gerbil, Brandt’s vole – Sukhbaatar Province, Mongolia
Siberian tiger – Russian Far East (Land of the Leopard National Park)
Musk deer, wild boar, Asiatic black bear – Durminskoye Forest reserve, Russia
Brown bear, musk ox – Nunavut, Canada
Hooded seal – West Ice, Greenland
Melt lakes and moulins – Russell glacier / Greenland Ice Cap
Glacier calving – Store glacier, Greenland
Polar bears – Svalbard, Norway

Key Technology

Glacier calving filmed by fast-response drone fleet

To film calving glaciers from an aerial perspective the team used drones. The glacier in question, Store Glacier, measures 5km across and the team had to be on standby watching the glacier 24/7 for more than four weeks, ready to launch the drones whenever action seemed likely, within minute of activity starting.

Then the pilot had to fly the drone some 1.5 km across the ocean to reach the vast glacier before they could even get a shot.

High-altitude filming using a gyrostabilised helicopter-mounted camera in Pakistan

The incredible ice-covered mountains of the Karakorum range have seldom been filmed. The Frozen Planet II team gained access to fly with the Pakistani Military and document both the ice fields and the mythical mountain, K2. Flying at over 7,000m, this was one of the highest altitude aerial filming trips ever undertaken by the BBC Natural History Unit and the pilot and crew had to be on oxygen at all times.

Light-weight drone revealing new insights into killer whale ‘wave-washing’ behaviour

Lightweight drones allowed a new angle on their amazing co-ordinated hunting. Viewed from the air, the way they form waves becomes more apparent producing new insights for science as well as television.

The team also employed new pole cameras to give an underwater insight, where diving would have been too dangerous.

Q&A with Alex Lanchester, Producer

Killer whales swim in tandem to create a wave in the hope of knocking a seal off the ice

Introduce Frozen Worlds.

Frozen Worlds is the opening episode and it’s a journey from the bottom to the top of the planet. Along the way we’re revealing the incredible frozen worlds that exist all across it.

We start in Antarctica, the most hostile of all of them. Here we film two stories. The first story is about emperor penguin chicks fledging. Left by their parents they’re making their journey alone to the ice edge to get to the ocean and they have to go through a number of different challenges. It’s a classic, heroic tale featuring these individuals that seem to be quite ill equipped as, for instance, they can’t walk very far and they can’t climb things. It turns out to be a bit of a miracle that they get there in the end but, once they get to the water, you see that actually this is where they’re meant to be and, off they go, into the Antarctic Ocean.

Then we do our first story about killer whales ‘wave-washing’. There’s a second story about this behaviour later in the series. This is an incredible piece of behaviour where the killer whales come together as a family. Because the seals are hauled up on pieces of ice, they worked out a hunting strategy where they create a wave and wash the seal off the ice. It’s one of the most sophisticated hunting techniques there is. They calculate the number of seals there are, the size of the wave depending on how far away they are, the number of whales needed to create it, etc. Not dissimilar to elephants, the knowledge of how to hunt and the best places to hunt is stored in the matriarch who runs the family and can get to over 100 years old. She’s utterly crucial to the whole pod’s survival. We follow her and see how the others must learn from her.

Then we journey to the mountains in Central Asia, home to the Himalaya, the biggest frozen world away from the poles. The Karakoram range is in the far west of the Himalaya and has the highest concentration of snow and ice anywhere outside the poles. We’ve done an aerial shoot there where we go big on the huge mountain glaciers.

That leads us to look in the penumbra of the Himalaya where there are other, even more surprising, frozen worlds like a desert that’s covered in snow. Next to the desert is the steppe, a big grassland where we find our next character, the Pallas’s cat. It’s the fluffiest cat in the world and we have a comedy sequence about it trying to catch gerbils and messing it up. Its paws get so cold on the snow it has to wave them to get the blood circulating back again. This makes its presence known before it can actually pounce.

We continue further north to our next frozen world which is a story about Siberian tigers, incredibly rare and hard to film, that go looking for hibernating black bears. We rigged caves and pathways and we can see the tigers entering the caves to look for prey. That hasn’t been filmed before.

In the tundra we have a quite intense and gruesome story with a brown bear attacking a herd of muskox and targeting calves.

Then we travel upwards to the Arctic Ocean for a bit of light relief as we meet the hooded seal. Its way of fending off other males and appealing to females is blowing a red balloon, the size of its head, out of its nose. We film a juvenile male who’s not having any luck, though he’s trying very hard with the females.

And then finally we look at how Greenland, the world’s largest island in the Arctic Ocean, is being affected by climate change. This culminates in a big calving event, with big bits of ice falling off the front of the ice sheet. We look at how this is affecting the Arctic’s wildlife, specifically a family of polar bears, and how hunting is getting harder and harder for them.

What of all those stories was the hardest to film?

The camera operator who filmed the muskox story had to camp out on the Arctic in blizzard conditions. He towed behind him a garden shed on his Skidoo and he lived in that. Not only did he have to deal with subzero temperatures and high winds, but also there was a very hungry brown bear circling around him at the same time. So that was definitely one of the most extreme places anyone had to work. Personally, I did the aerial filming in the Karakoram. Not only was it cold, but we were above 7000 metres, filming some of the highest aerials ever filmed. The oxygen level was so low there that it’s probably the sickest I’ve ever felt. In addition, being in Kashmir, you have to work with the Pakistan military. We were using their helicopters so we had to divert to pick up casualties from the frontline and land on glaciers, 6500 metres up. They are incredible pilots but they push to the extreme what’s possible in flying a helicopter at high altitude.

What new technologies did you employ?

Drones have played a big role. ‘Wave-washing’ behaviour was actually captured in the original Frozen Planet but without that aerial perspective. This is about as remote as you can be in the Antarctic Peninsula: it would be hard to get a helicopter out there and a helicopter could disturb their behaviour. Drones allow you to see how those whales are coordinating. It means we’re able to bring new revelations. We’ve also had drones flying in new ways.

In order to capture how these environments are changing we’ve also undertaken a massive time lapse project across the production. We’ve been running time lapses from satellites in space to show the movement of ice in Greenland. And we’ve been putting cameras up on high altitude glaciers.

How will Frozen Worlds challenge people’s ideas of the frozen planet?

Our hope is that we can show people that the diversity of frozen habitats is huge. There’s a frozen habitat on every continent on Earth and we literally cover all the continents in this series. Hopefully people realise that they’re much closer to these places than they might think and that there’s a greater diversity of life and animals that relies on and lives in these worlds. As a side, hopefully, that will encourage people to keep protecting them. Because climate change doesn’t just affect the poles, it also affects all these other frozen worlds around the world. They’re all at risk.

Alex Lanchester Biography

Alex is the producer of both the Frozen Worlds & Frozen Peaks episodes of Frozen Planet II. In the 14 years that he has been working for the BBC’s Natural History Unit his passion to deliver ground-breaking stories has taken him from the sewers of Bangkok (Wild Cities) to the high peaks of the Himalaya (Mountains: Life at the Extreme). Alex has worked extensively at high altitude and specialises in filming in extreme environments, such as the Arctic Tundra (Alaska: Earths Frozen Kingdom) and the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea (Attenborough’s Paradise Birds).

For Frozen Planet II Alex travelled to Pakistan, to capture the splendour of the remote Karakorum mountains, deep into Greenland’s ice sheet to document the seismic changes occurring there due to climate change and to the far east of Russia to film the illusive Siberian Tiger.

Episode 2 – Frozen Ocean

A polar bear pouncing to catch her seal prey, hidden under several feet of snow and sea ice.

In Frozen Ocean the series dives into a world of water and ice to reveal the animals which survive on and under the Arctic sea ice. It’s a seasonal story that begins in the depths of winter. This is a time of plenty for polar bears who can afford to play in the short winter days, through to the perils of spring as the sea ice breaks up, finally to its bountiful summer where visitors are drawn to the ocean from afar to feed up and breed.

A pod of beluga whales has been confined to an ice hole for five months risking starvation as the food around them runs out. In spring the sun melts the sea ice allowing their escape. And off the east coast of Greenland, the floating pack ice becomes a nursery ground for harp seals.

Summer is a time of plenty in the Arctic Ocean and plankton blooms feed millions of tiny skeleton shrimps and ancient bowhead whales. But today’s loss of sea ice is having a profound impact on these long-lived creatures. Every year they travel to secret locations, known as ‘whale spas’, and their vulnerable calves are now more likely than ever to be attacked by killer whales.

Full summer also brings 24-hour daylight to the Arctic attracting visitors from afar, including huge flocks of seabirds like crested auklets. For the resident walrus the summer heat can be unbearable and an old male uses an ingenious technique to get himself back to the cool of the water. And a mother polar bear finds herself stranded on a remote island full of threatening males as she struggles to feed her cubs.