Just hearing his wise tones, as his presumably brave (or is the BBC just threatening him with loss of pension?) cameraman dives in glacial waters to film the flippers of a… flipper-thing – well, it gives you hope for humanity and the continuance of nature documentaries, and Frozen Planet has been one of the best.
As nearly 2 billion people – approximately one in three people on the planet – rely on drinking or irrigation water from these glaciers, I decided it was time to emerge from retirement for another symbolic swim – this time in a glacial lake under the summit of Mount Everest.
In the designers' fertile imagination, the context may well be a glacial formation on a distant ice planet, but the reality is a dense knot of Victorian railway viaducts and roads in Southwark, which they have done their best to ignore.
The planet may be entering another glacial period by this time.
If the long-term effects of global warming are disregarded, Milankovitch theory predicts that the planet will continue to undergo glacial periods at least until the quaternary glaciation comes to an end.
Now the discovery of a new so-called "sub-glacial" lake in what could be the planet's biggest canyon is fueling speculation that the dark, frigid waters of the South Pole might hold clues to figuring out whether life exists under potentially similar conditions beyond Earth.
In "Luce Nascosta," nine circular shapes hang above the stage; at a glacial pace, these discs expand and contract like amber planets aligning in space.
There is significant evidence that a severe glacial action during the Neoproterozoic era covered much of the planet in a sheet of ice.
As they worked to "crack the code of glacial inception," attempting to explain when and under what conditions the planet enters into an ice age, they found that anthropogenic emissions, not only levels of solar radiation, have now become a permanent variable in that equation.
Since the 1960s, it has been hypothesized that severe glacial action between 750 and, during the Neoproterozoic, covered much of the planet in a sheet of ice.
