A look at the life, passions, achievements and tragedies surrounding the famous Jacques Cousteau, featuring an archive of his newly restored footage. Its focus will be on the inventor-explorer-environmentalist-filmmaker revolution, i.e., giving mankind the resources to explore the ocean with the Aqua Lung, calling attention to ocean pollution, and his long-time collaboration.

Experience the world from the viewpoint of animals themselves. From spellbinding wildlife spectacle to intimate encounters, Planet Earth II takes you closer than ever before.
Remote islands offer sanctuary for some of the planet's strangest and rarest creatures. The rare pygmy three-toed sloth enjoys a peaceful existence on an idyllic Caribbean island, while nesting albatross thrive in predator-free isolation. But island life always comes at a cost. On the Galapagos Islands, young marine iguana must escape an onslaught of deadly racer snakes the moment they hatch from the sand. On the sub-Antarctic island of Zavodovski, life gets more extreme still. Every day, one and a half million penguins risk being battered against the rocks by fierce waves as they try to get on and off the island.

At the end of each Antarctic summer, the emperor penguins of the South Pole journey to their traditional breeding grounds in a fascinating mating ritual that is captured in this documentary by intrepid filmmaker Luc Jacquet. The journey across frozen tundra proves to be the simplest part of the ritual, as after the egg is hatched, the female must delicately transfer it to the male and make her way back to the distant sea to nourish herself and bring back food to her newborn chick.

The polar regions of our planet may seem beyond the reach of most of us, but they are not beyond our influence. We, unintentionally, are changing these frozen worlds, and these changes will not just affect the poles but the whole planet. On the unforgiving frontier of climate change, polar bears, walruses, seals and penguins find their icy Edens in peril.

You find fungi in Antarctica and in nuclear reactors. They live inside your lungs and your skin is covered with them. Fungi are the most under appreciated and unexplained organisms, yet they could cure you from smallpox and turn cardboard boxes into forests. They could even transform Mars into Eden. There are vastly more fungi species than plants and each and every one of them plays a crucial role in life’s support systems. Join us on a journey into the mysterious world of Fungi to witness their beauty, unravel their mysteries and discover how this secret kingdom is essential to life on Earth, and may in fact hold the key to our future.

In the fourth episode, leading landscape photographer Peter Eastway follows in the footsteps of Frank Hurley – the pioneering Australian photographer on Shackleton’s expedition to the south a century ago – to capture the wilderness and wildlife of Antarctica and South Georgia.