600 miles off the coast of South America in the Pacific Ocean there are 120 tropical islands that erupted from the deep ocean floor more than 10 million years ago. Journey from the lava ramparts to its fiery heart, we'll discover how the Galapagos archipelago became one of the most important areas of biodiversity in the world. Those swept here by storms and currents survived million to one odds to find untouched islands free from competition. These hardy pioneers evolved in remarkable ways in what's known as Nature's Greatest Experiment. Home to bizarre specialists and unexpected giants, the most precious collection of island creatures on Earth.
At the far tip of South America, lies a magical realm that seems frozen in time. Known as 'the end of the world', this is Patagonia. Vast glaciers shaped it into an Eden like no other. Adaptable and resilient creatures evolved unique survival strategies to flourish across its remarkable habitats. From precipitous mountain citadels and icy desert plateaus windswept steppe uplands through remote, primal forests to a mosaic of glacial valleys. To thrive here is to be as extreme as the land itself.
In Southeast Alaska, there's an ice-bound Eden that harbors possibly the richest temperate rainforests of all. Where the coastal mountains meet the Pacific, lays the Alexander Archipelago, a remote island chain running for almost 300 miles along the Alaskan Panhandle. This frozen frontier is one of the last great wildernesses of North America. And a stronghold for the country's highest diversity of megafauna, feasting on the abundance of fleeting summers to make it through relentless winters.
Inside the world-renowned physics laboratory Fermilab, a team of scientists are constructing an audacious experiment to hunt for a mysterious new ‘ghost’ neutrino. If they find it, this could transform our understanding of the nature and fabric of our universe. The problem is, these tiny particles are almost impossible to detect. Elsewhere, physicists conduct experiments in some of the most extreme environments on the planet: from deep mine shafts in South Dakota to vast ice fields at the South Pole. In these unlikely places supersized neutrino detectors hope to unlock the universe’s deepest secrets. Could neutrinos overturn the most precise theory of particle physics that humans have ever written down? Could they even be a link to a hidden realm of new particles that permeate the cosmos – so called dark matter? Scientists at Fermilab are edging towards the truth.
The film is a cinematic quest to find the '52 Hertz Whale,' which scientists believe has spent its entire life in solitude, calling out at a frequency that is different from any other whale. As we search for this elusive creature, we will explore the phenomenon of human reaction to its plight, while revealing its connection to the growing epidemic of loneliness in our interconnected world.
They're the cooling corpses of stars like our sun, but new research proves white dwarfs are one of the driving forces of our universe. And they can tell us literally about the nature of the cosmos itself. Have scientists finally discovered how these small stars could be such massive galactic players?
Those swept here by storms and currents survived million to one odds to find untouched islands free from competition. These hardy pioneers evolved in remarkable ways in what's known as Nature's Greatest Experiment. Home to bizarre specialists and unexpected giants, the most precious collection of island creatures on Earth.