Wild Films ~ On Thin Ice
David Attenborough investigates the effects of rising temperatures at the polar regions.
Winner! Sapphire Award, Best Narration & Hero to Wildlife Award at the 2012 Intn'l Wildlife Film Festival
About the film
David Attenborough journeys to both polar regions to investigate what rising temperatures will mean for the people and wildlife that live there and for the rest of the planet.
David starts out at the North Pole, standing on sea ice several meters thick, but which scientists predict could be open ocean within the next few decades. The Arctic has been warming at twice the global average, so David heads out with a Norwegian team to see what this means for polar bears. He comes face-to-face with a tranquilized female, and discovers that mothers and cubs are going hungry as the sea ice on which they hunt disappears. In Canada, Inuit hunters have seen with their own eyes what scientists have seen from space; the Arctic Ocean has lost 30% of its summer ice cover over the last 30 years. For some, the melting sea ice will allow access to trillions of dollars worth of oil, gas and minerals. For the rest of us, it means the planet will get warmer, as sea ice is important to reflect back the sun's energy. Next David travels to see what is happening to the ice on land: in Greenland, we follow intrepid ice scientists as they study giant waterfalls of meltwater, which are accelerating iceberg calving events, and ultimately leading to a rise in global sea level.
Temperatures have also risen in the Antarctic. David returns to glaciers photographed by the Shackleton expedition and reveals a dramatic retreat over the past century. It is not just the ice that is changing - ice-loving adelie penguins are disappearing, and more temperate gentoo penguins are moving in. Finally, we see the first ever images of the largest recent natural event on our planet - the break up of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, an ice sheet the size of Jamaica, which shattered into hundreds of icebergs in 2009.
Watch clips from On Thin Ice here.
Run time: 60 min.
WILD FILMS AT THE LIBRARY is a free series of award-winning international wildlife films selected from the International Wildlife Film Festival. The International Wildlife Film Festival was established in 1977 in Missoula, Montana with a mission to promote awareness, knowledge and understanding of wildlife, habitat, people and nature through excellence in film, television and other media.