20 October, 2011 News stories

Series starts Wednesday 26 October, BBC1 at 9.00pm, repeated on Sundays at 4.10pm.

Embark on the trip of a lifetime, as the award-winning BBC team behind Planet Earth takes you on the ultimate polar expedition into a breathtaking landscape most humans will never experience. This landmark series brings to the screen the frozen wildernesses of the Arctic and the Antarctic in a completely new way.

Ambitious and epic in scale, Frozen Planet captures all the fragile, jaw-dropping beauty and majestic power of the elements in the greatest wilderness on Earth. Narrated by David Attenborough and featuring the incredible wildlife cinematography that made Planet Earth such a worldwide success, the team have really pushed the limits. They have taken new technology to the most extreme and remote parts of the planet to capture ground-breaking imagery above and below the ice.

Using breath-taking new filming techniques, Frozen Planet gets closer than ever before to the lives of our best loved and most charismatic animal characters – polar bears, wolves, penguins and orcas.

The series embarks on an extraordinary journey from the North to the South Pole.

Access to the Polar Regions, especially the Antarctic is a real challenge. British Antarctic Survey is pleased to have contributed its regional knowledge and science expertise to help facilitate BBC crew visits to its Rothera and Bird Island Research Stations in 2010. With help from the scientists on the ground, the series delves into the behaviour of penguins, seals and albatrosses on the sub-antarctic island of South Georgia and later heads to a recently collapsed ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula with BAS glaciologist Dr Andy Smith.

Professor Nicholas Owens, Director of British Antarctic Survey says,

“BAS, working with the BBC and OU has given us an opportunity to engage millions of people in the importance and relevance of the polar regions for understanding our changing world.”

Staff at Rothera Station watched programme one with the rest of the UK public and felt very lucky to share in the awe and excitement from Antarctica itself.

Claim your fabulous FREE polar regions map/poster produced by the OU, in association with BAS