Location
Antarctica
Partners
BBC Natural History Unit
Release Date
Winter 2016
Location
Antarctica
Partners
BBC Natural History Unit
Release Date
Winter 2016
A historic mission to explore the depths of Antarctica for the first time.
A historic mission to explore the depths of Antarctica for the first time.
Overview
For the internationally acclaimed TV series Blue Planet II, OceanX took a BBC team where no one had gone before: 1,000 meters beneath Antarctica’s ocean. What they found there awed the team, and millions of viewers around the world. This previously unexplored territory plays a central role in our planet’s life cycle — dubbed “the lungs of the deep,” it is the source of oxygen-rich waters that bring life to deep oceans all over the world.
Findings
At 1,000 meters down, despite the extreme cold, the team found a sea floor literally crawling with life. Marine “snow” — organic matter descending from above, and an important source of food — was thicker here than they’d seen anywhere else in the ocean. On a single rock, the team counted more than a dozen different species. And because few fish can survive in water this cold, invertebrates were the dominant predator, as they were 350 million years ago. It was like diving into the ocean’s past. Of course, we shared the experience with the world. Awe-inspiring footage from the mission was featured in Blue Planet II, in an episode titled, simply, “The Deep.” This mission proves, in the words of science leader Jon Copley, “there is no longer any part of our blue planet that is inaccessible to us, if we can find the will to go there."
