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Big Freeze, The (6/8)

This is also part of this series: Earth Story Series (8)

Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeology, Environment, General Interest, Geography, Natural History, Nature, Ocean, Science

Grade Level: JrH-Adult
Producer: BBC
Closed Captioned: No

Running Time: 50 mins
Country of Origin: Great Britain
Study Guide: No

Copyright Date: 1998
Available in French:

Travelling around the Alps, in Switzerland, the Karoo of Southern Africa and the lush island of Barbados, this programme discovers that, throughout its long history, the Earth's climate has been in constant turmoil. After flying for four hours over a featureless white plateau, Danish geologist Niels Gundestrup arrives at his campsite on the Greenland ice sheet, a relic of the last Ice Age. The base is temporary home to 30 scientists who spend their days drilling down into the ice. They aim to bring up a continuous core of ice, three kilometres long, because every centimetre is a Rosetta Stone of climate history. The ice core stretches back 250,000 years but, to really understand all the climate changes throughout the entire history of Earth, it is necessary to examine the rock record,which dates back billions of years. In the crackling heat of South Africa, local geologist Maarten de Wit finds evidence that all the continents in the Southern Hemisphere – including India and Australia – were once in the grip of an Ice Age 300 million years ago. Scientists are finally beginning to realize that climate change is simply an inevitable consequence of the way the Earth works. But Greenland's ice cap reveals that the last 10,000 years have been a remarkably stable time for climate – allowing agriculture and civilisations to develop. The programme asks whether, despite human intervention, the present balmy conditions could be just a temporary lull before an inevitable return to more frigid times?

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