Arctic Worlds

Little more than 100 years ago, maps of the world still boasted white space: places where no human had ever trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world's environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the 20th century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different kinds of extremes, doctors pushed the bounds of medical advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could answer.

Join Todd McLeish as he travels high above the Arctic circle. McLeish consults logbooks kept by whalers and explorers and interviews folklorists and historians to tease out the relationship between the real narwhal and the mythical unicorn. In Colorado, he visits climatologists studying changes in the seasonal cycles of the Arctic ice. From a history of the trade in narwhal tusks to descriptions of narwhals' vocalizations as heard through hydrophones, Narwhals reveals the beauty and thrill of the narwhal and its habitat and the threat it faces from a rapidly changing world.

"You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island.

In 1913, a beat-up old whaling ship called the Karluk was taking the men of the Canadian Arctic Expedition north of Alaska. They were in search of an undiscovered continent and things were going just swell - that is, until their ship became trapped in an ice floe and their leader, Viljamur Steffanson, abandoned them.

One of the most interesting activities that the Inuits have been doing for generations has something to do with their oral traditions. The Inuits had stories about their families, their hunts, and their adventures....

A remarkable true story of adventure, betrayal, and survival set in one of the world's most inhospitable places. In 1906, from atop a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest of Greenland, hundreds of miles from another human being, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted a line of mysterious peaks looming in the distance. He called this unexplored realm "Crocker Land". Scientists and explorers agreed that the world-famous explorer had discovered a new continent rising from the frozen Arctic Ocean.

In the predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, three million men waited along a front stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and his allied states stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

This lyrical poem sends listeners sailing through the Arctic night sky to experience and hear the unique beauty of a Northern night.

On the 8th June 1940, the Nazi battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau opened their guns on the aircraft-carrier HMS Glorious. Within minutes, the Glorious was taking on water, and the order was given to abandon ship. Only 40 men survived this ordeal, one of which was Royal Marine Ronald "Tubby" Healiss, who served as a member of a 4.7 gun crew on the Glorious. His award-winning account is a true and terrible record of suffering, which uncovers one of the greatest undocumented naval stories of the Second World War.

On November 12, 1912, a rescue team trekking across Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier finally found what they sought - the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scott's frozen body lay between the bodies of two fellow explorers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of supplies which might have saved them.

When Eva's twin brother, Eamon, falls to his death just a few months before he is due to participate in the Testing, no one expects Eva to take his place. She's a Maiden, slated for embroidery classes, curtseys, and soon, a prestigious marriage befitting the daughter of an Aerie ruler. But Eva insists on honoring her brother by becoming a Testor. After all, she wouldn't be the first Maiden to Test - just the first in 150 years.

Matthew has dreamed and read and thought about the North Pole for as long as he can remember. And he has done it secretly. It is a place that cannot be tarnished by the world in which he lives – a world where he struggles to find answers and make friends, while everything seems to come easily to other children. But one day, a crow called Lewis Carmichael lands at Matthew's window – a crow who believes in Matthew in the most simple and ordinary ways. Soon, the unexpected voyage of a lifetime begins, and it will change everything.

Melting ice, a military arms race, the rush to exploit resources at any cost - the Arctic is now the stage on which our future will be decided. And as temperatures rise and the ice retreats, Vladimir Putin orders Russia's oil rigs to move north. But one early September morning in 2013, 30 men and women from 18 countries - the crew of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise - decide to draw a line in the ice and protest the drilling in the Arctic.

Survival. It makes for exciting TV, but all Josh wants a life that passes for normal. A real house, not a cabin in the woods. Hockey, not hunting to put food on the table. Girls. But his half-brother, Nathan, wants to prove himself in the Alaska wilderness, and their father won’t let him do it alone.

Árni is about to leave his burrow for a four-year adventure out at sea. But Árni doesn’t want to go, at least not today. You see, he wants one more day to play with his best friend Birta, but she can’t be found. Summertime in Iceland means nearly 24 hours of glistening sunlight each day - perfect for lighting the way for adventurous little puffins. While Árni searches Iceland for Birta, his mother and father are searching for him. Little pufflings shouldn’t be wandering about all alone!

Dashing Esquire Fox used to organize the world’s most elaborate chicken raids until the day she encountered Mr. Pepper. Meeting the blustery old rooster changed her heart, convincing her to turn from a life of crime and instead form the Animal Rescue Agency, which masterminds rescue operations across the globe.

Herr Lehmann ist ein Gartenzwerg. Doch er ist kein gewöhnlicher Zwerg, denn er kann sprechen und sein sehnlichster Wunsch ist es, seine griesgrämige Besitzerin, Frau Sauertopf, glücklich zu machen. Das gelingt jedoch nur, wenn ihr interessante und abenteuerliche Geschichten aus aller Welt erzählt werden. Doch leider kommt niemand zu Frau Sauertopf, um ihr solche Geschichten zu erzählen. Also fasst Herr Lehmann den Plan, sich heimlich im Koffer von Herrn Reisegern zu verstecken, um in der weiten Welt Geschichten zu sammeln.

ᒪᕐᕉᒃ ᐃᓄᑦᑎᐊᕚᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐸᕿᑦᑎᐊᓲᒃ ᓄᑲᕇᒃ. ᓄᓇᓕᒃ ᐅᓇ ᑭᓐᖒᒪᒋᔭᖃᓐᖏᑦᑐᖅ ᑕᒪᒃᑭᖅᓯᒪᑦᑎᐊᖅᑐᖅ. ᐊᓐᓂᕈᓱᖕᓂᐋᓗᒃ, ᐃᓄᑦᑎᐊᕙᐅᓐᖏᑦᑐᖅ ᖃᓪᓗᐱᓪᓗᒃ. ᓄᓇ ᑐᖁᑕᐅᔪᓐᓇᖅᑐᖅ ᑕᕐᓂᖓᓗ.

It might seem lonely at the top of the world, but the North Pole is teeming with life! Polar bears, walruses, and arctic seals make their home on sea ice that can be nine feet thick while the Inuit and other indigenous peoples continue their traditions and means for survival in this harsh climate.

A story about a rare snowman and his dilemmas of being made up of sweet lemon ice. Between dodging Arctic nutcrackers and being pursued by a fire tiger, Gelo’s primary focus is to not melt, be seen, or be eaten. It’s a cold world. Especially as a snowman.