breathtaking pictures on melting polar worlds

These stunning images reveal a remarkable glimpse of life at the ends of the earth.


Our melting polar worlds have been captured in breathtaking pictures by the BBC for this autumn's landmark natural history series Frozen Planet.
It is the last chance to see the world's greatest wildernesses before they change forever, according to narrator Sir David Attenborough.

Got you: An orca takes a seal and drags it into the water to drown it after a three hour team hunt in which the entire pod co-operated in order to make giant waves that washed the seal from its initial ice floe

Bear necessities: A male polar bear showing battle scars and the mate he defended from 10 suitors. Their courtship was filmed over a fortnight, capturing extraordinary intimate and tender moments

Whale of a surprise: A cameraman holding a camera on a pole in the icy Antarctic water, gets a shock when an killer whale mother and calf explode out of the water in front of his face

Target: A sea lion chases a Gentoo penguin onto land - both are like fish out of water and the sea lion struggles to make a kill

Smoking: An early-morning view of Mt Erebus, Antarctica's only continuously active volcano. The aerial crew waited eight weeks to get a clear view of the top of the volcano which was extremely treacherous to fly around

Blue lagoon: Aerial shot of a sapphire blue meltwater lake on Greenland which formed in a matter of days, but several weeks later drained into the ice sheet in a matter of hours

'The pictures captured behaviour and phenomena that had never before been recorded,' said Sir David, 85. 'Those pictures will become increasingly valuable as time passes. 
'For this may well prove to be our last chance to record, in their full splendour, these astonishing wonderlands that have existed for hundreds of thousands of years before humans reached them and which now, within a century, may change beyond recognition.'

The pictures are published in a book - the first to cover both the Arctic and Antarctic - to accompany the epic seven-part series from the team that produced Blue Planet and Planet Earth which were seen by 12 million viewers in the UK and 80 million worldwide.

Desolate: A nunatak, an exposed rocky peak, pokes through the ice sheet in Antarctica where 90 per cent of the world's ice is found and is nearly three miles thick in places

P-p-p-perishing: King penguins silhouetted at dawn on the island of South Georgia in the Falklands. They are the second largest species of penguin, weighing up to 35lbs

Killer pack: Twenty-five timberwolves led by the alpha female, travel single-file through the deep snow to save energy as they track bison on the Arctic circle in northern Canada in temperatures of -40c

In for the kill: Timberwolves forced the bison herd to stampede and picked off a yearling which fell behind after another bison ran headlong into it

Frozen Planet starts on Wednesday, October 26 on BBC1. The crew used specially-made cameras to shoot at lower temperatures than ever before.
Nearly five years in the making, awe-inspiring  freezing landscapes and the elemental forces of ice, weather and ocean are revealed in astonishing footage
The series also catalogues an intimate snapshot of some of the individual animals who fight to survive including a male polar bear that fought off ten suitors to make sure its mate would have his children.

With chapters themed by season, Frozen Planet tracks a year in the polar regions from the ‘Great Melt’ in spring to the 24-hour daylight of summer, followed by the ‘Big Freeze’ of autumn and ending with the perpetual night of winter. 

It documents, often for the first time, the behaviour of their inhabitants including the ingenious teamwork adopted by killer whales hunting other whales and seals in the Antarctic, the courtship of polar bears and the memorable hunting exploits of wolves in the far North.


Snow scene: Finland's frozen taiga forest shot in a magical light.The Taiga is the greatest forest on Earth, containing at least a third of all the world's trees

Go with the floe: A giant iceberg hundreds of metres across which would dwarf most of the world's buildings. It collapsed from Store Glacier on the west coast of Greenland

Flakey: A close-up of a snowflake which was filmed with unique macro technology developed especially for the shot

Surf dude: A Gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua papua) rides the wave. The penguins are masterful surfers and were filmed at high speed as they came ashore to feed their young

Bird bath: An aerial shot of a humpback whale filmed at the largest gathering of shearwaters on the planet - 18 million off the coast of Alaska in the Aleutians

Benefiting from footage shot using the world’s most cutting-edge filming techniques, the book has extraordinary aerial views of vast frozen landscapes and animal behaviour impossible to see from the ground.

Cameramen filmed the remote interior of the Antarctic continent and the migration of whales to the polar regions. It also takes us under the ice, into the heart of glaciers and inside volcanic ice-crystal caves.

In its final chapter, Frozen Planet tells the amazing adventure stories behind making the series and discusses the unique challenges of filming in extreme cold and unpredictable weather conditions.

Swoop: The reclusive Great Grey owl is one of the largest owls in the world with a wingspan of between four to five feet. It it is often referred to as the Great Grey Ghost or Phantom of the North


Krill bill: A humpback whale dives for krill fish amidst thousands of short-tailed shearwaters in the Bering Sea off Alaska while on the seabed there are giant sponges up to 2 metres high as much as a thousand years old

Sea world: A cameraman bolts an underwater tripod to the ice ceiling to get extraordinarily stable, shots of amazing ice formations or ice chandeliers , which were inhabited by millions of tiny ice fish whose bodies were full of anti-freeze