Planet Earth

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Description

Episodes

• From Pole to Pole

  Season 1: Episode 1Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  The lives of animals and plants are dominated by the sun and fresh water which trigger seasonal journeys. The latest technology and aerial photography enable the Planet Earth team to track some of the greatest mass migrations. In the Arctic spring, a mother polar bear and cubs emerge from their winter den to cross the frozen sea before it melts. Further south, time-lapse cameras capture the annual transformation created by the Okavango floods.
  1. From Pole to Pole
  49 Min

  5/3/2006

  AU$3.49

• Mountains

  Season 1: Episode 2Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  Tour the mightiest mountain ranges, starting with the birth of a mountain at one of the lowest places on Earth, and ending on the summit of Everest. High in the peaks of Pakistan, this episode shows the first ever video footage of the elusive and extremely rare snow leopard. The wildlife spectacles continue with the first shots of a wild giant panda nursing her week-old baby in a mountain cave in China, and an aerial journey along side demoiselle cranes as they attempt to cross the largest range of mountains on our planet – the Himalayas.
  2. Mountains
  47 Min

  12/3/2006

  AU$3.49

• Fresh Water

  Season 1: Episode 3Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  Fresh water defines the distribution of life on land. Follow the descent of rivers from their mountain sources to the sea. Watch spectacular waterfalls, fly inside the Grand Canyon and explore the wildlife in the world's deepest lake. Planet Earth captures unique and dramatic moments of animal behaviour: a showdown between smooth-coated otters and mugger crocodiles, deep-diving long tailed macaques, massive flocks of snow geese on the wing and a piranha frenzy in the perilous waters of the world's largest wetland.
  3. Fresh Water
  49 Min

  19/3/2006

  AU$3.49

• Caves

  Season 1: Episode 4Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  Planet Earth gets unique access to a hidden world of stalactites, stalagmites, snotites and troglodytes. The Cave of Swallows in Mexico is a 400m vertical shaft, deep enough to engulf the Empire State Building, while America’s Lechuguilla cave system stretches 193km and contains crystals six metres long. But despite perpetual darkness, this mysterious world is home to some of the most remarkable and bizarre animals on Earth - from cave swiflets, which navigate through pitch-black caverns using echo-location, to the Texas cave salamander that has neither eyes nor pigment.
  4. Caves
  49 Min

  26/3/2006

  AU$3.49

• Deserts

  Season 1: Episode 5Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  Around thirty percent of the land's surface is desert. United by their lack of rain, they are home to some of our planet's most varied ecosystems. In the Gobi Desert, rare Bactrian camels get moisture from the snow, while in Chile the Atacama guanacos survive by licking dew off cactus spines. Saharan sandstorms reach nearly a mile high and desert rivers run for a single day. The brief blooming of Death Valley triggers a plague of locusts 160km long, and a unique aerial voyage over the Namibian desert reveals elephants on a long trek for food and desert lions searching for wandering oryx.
  5. Deserts
  49 Min

  2/4/2006

  AU$3.49

• Ice Worlds

  Season 1: Episode 6Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  As the sun abandons one pole and journeys to the other, the frozen worlds of the Arctic and Antarctic undergo the most extreme seasonal transformation on the planet. Under the water, humpback whales are seen creating a net of bubbles in which to catch their prey, and time-lapse cameras reveal new science about the dynamics of emperor penguin behaviour. Two years on, Planet Earth catches up with two familiar polar bears - independent from their mother, they are now facing incredible survival challenges as climate change transforms the planet's ice worlds.
  6. Ice Worlds
  49 Min

  5/11/2006

  AU$3.49

• Great Plains

  Season 1: Episode 7Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  The vast open wildernesses of the African savannah, Asian steppe, Arctic tundra and North American prairies are the Great Plains of the planet. The bizarre-looking Tibetan fox is captured on film for the first time as it hunts the rabbit-like pika, and the tall grassland plains of Northern India reveal a diverse range of animals, from elephants and rhino down to the smallest of all wild pigs – the pygmy hog. The team spend six weeks following a pride of thirty lions, as hunger drives them to eye up a herd of elephants around a watering hole.
  7. Great Plains
  49 Min

  12/11/2006

  AU$3.49

• Jungles

  Season 1: Episode 8HD

  Jungles cover roughly three per cent of our planet yet contain a staggering fifty per cent of the world's species. Specialisation is the key to survival, and the red crab spider is the most specialised of all arachnids, spending its entire life on a small, water-filled pitcher plant feeding off mosquito larvae. In Uganda's Ngogo forest, the largest chimpanzee group in the world defends its territory from neighbouring chimp groups in a first for natural history footage.
  8. Jungles
  49 Min

  19/11/2006

  AU$3.49

• Shallow Seas

  Season 1: Episode 9Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  A humpback whale mother and calf embark on an epic journey from tropical coral paradises to storm-ravaged polar seas. Newly discovered coral reefs in Indonesia reveal head-butting pygmy seahorses, flashing 'electric' clams and bands of sea kraits, thirty-strong, which hunt in packs. With new ultra high-speed photography, the lightning ambushes of great white sharks are slowed down as they leap out of the ocean to catch their unsuspecting prey.
  9. Shallow Seas
  49 Min

  26/11/2006

  AU$3.49

• Seasonal Forests

  Season 1: Episode 10Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  The Taiga forest, on the edge of the Arctic, is a silent world of stunted conifers containing a third of all the trees on Earth. In California, the giant sequoia General Sherman is ten times the size of a blue whale, making it the largest living thing on the planet. The most ancient organisms alive are the bristlecone pines, which, at four thousand years old, pre-date the pyramids. But the upside-down baobab trees of Madagascar are perhaps the strangest of all, with their swollen trunks that harbour equally curious wildlife.
  10. Seasonal Forests
  49 Min

  3/12/2006

  AU$3.49

• Ocean Deep

  Season 1: Episode 11Australian Communications and Media AuthorityHD

  Life goes to extraordinary lengths to survive in this immense underwater realm. A thirty tonne whale shark gorges on a school of fish and the unique overhead heli-gimbal camera reveals common dolphins rocketing at more than thirty kilometres an hour. Descending into the abyss, deep sea octopus fly with wings and vampire squid use bioluminescence to create an extraordinary colour display. And, in an extraordinary moment, one hundred hunting sailfish gun down their prey - each seeking their turn in a perfectly choreographed dance of death.
  11. Ocean Deep
  49 Min

  10/12/2006

  AU$3.49

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