The male usually leads. If the female is sufficiently impressed, the pair seal their relationship with a vocal duet. King Penguin rookeries are very busy places. Every morning at about 6:00, the adults leave their chicks, cross the glacier stream and...
Throughout the winter, adults come and go from their traditional breeding colonies. Antarctica is home to 2 million Kings. In this one colony alone, there are 600,000 of them. These engaging chicks are so inquisitive that you only have to sit down to...
An adult wanderer may travel 5, 000 miles, sometimes to Brazil and back, in order to collect squid for its young. This enormous chick weighs 10 kilos, as much as a full-grown swan. It's the biggest of any seabird chick. Although it's a couple of mont...
Fur seals also feed out in the open ocean, but they are able to dive to a hundred meters or more. The patchiness of the krill requires those that live on it to spend a great deal of time searching. And an albatross will fly hundreds, sometimes thousa...
Other creatures benefit from the whales' industry-sea birds forage in their wake. As the whales drive the krill closer to the surface, it comes within reach of birds that are not particularly skilled in diving. Cape Petrels, about the size of pigeons...
Humpback whales. During the brief summer they gorge themselves on krill. When the krill swarms are near the surface, the humpbacks collect them by lunging. They simply open their cavernous mouths and scoop it up. Often the whales cooperate, working t...
Huge though bergs may be, they are nonetheless usually on the move. But come the winter, sea ice forms around them and locks them solid. As winter progresses, so more and more of the sea freezes, spreading out from the margins of the land like an imm...
Rivers of ice spill down from the icecap as great glaciers and creep slowly towards the edge of the continent and the sea. When you get beneath the snout of one of these huge glaciers, you begin to appreciate the immense power and size of the Antarct...
I am at the very center of the great white continent, Antarctica. The South Pole is about half a mile away. For a thousand miles, in all directions, there is nothing but ice. And, in the whole of this continent, which is one and a half times the size...
...what's more, You can start to say perhaps what the planet's made of, and you can follow it in its orbit. You can understand it in much more detail. In the future, the revamped Hubble Space Telescope may even detect planetary systems more like our...
Well, the way we look for planets is actually very easy. We can't see the planets orbiting other stars because the glare of the star is just simply too great. It wipes out the planets' light. But what we can do is look for the response of the star du...
How likely that technology will destroy those who invented it? The Drake Equation doesnt exactly narrow the field. Depending on the variables, the number of intelligent civilizations could be zero or a billion or any number in between. Richard Dawkin...
We have reasons to suspect, based on recent high resolution photography of the surface, that there may be a subsurface ocean there. And where we find water and where we find the right mix of organics, there is the possibility for life. So we have to...
cold conditions that earth has to offer. Professor Freeman believes these rugged microorganisms are probably capable of surviving on Mars. Mars is certainly our best bet for finding life in the inner solar system. But the chances of life existing in...
He wears gloves and cleans his tools with alcohol to avoid contaminating the ancient salt samples with modern microorganisms. The salt round about us was crystallized out 260 million years ago, and 260 million years ago, organisms in this salt lake c...
