Explorer Nr.1 2020

Tells the remarkable true story of how, in 1968, four "average Joes" from Minnesota teamed up with a French Canadian bon vivant to make the 500-mile journey across the polar ice cap to the North Pole via snowmobile.

Anthropologist Professor Alice Roberts and historian Dr Yasmin Khan explore the tale of two of Britain’s greatest cities - how one became the capital of a global empire and the other the workshop of the world - through the giant excavations being undertaken at either end of the first stage of the HS2 rail project.

Gregg Wallace is in Essex at an enormous cereal bar factory, which produces 400,000 fruit- and nut-packed treats a day. Gregg follows production from the arrival of two tonnes of macadamia nuts all the way through to dispatch. Along the way, he gets hands on with all the ingredients, from nuts to cranberries and sultanas to puffed rice. He learns that it takes a carefully balanced blend of honey and glucose to bind the ingredients together. Too much honey and the bar would be too chewy. Too much glucose and it would set rock solid. A mix of both produces the ideal texture.

As the sea ice between Canada and Greenland melts, the outside world sees unprecedented opportunity. Oil and gas deposits, faster shipping routes, tourism and fishing all provide financial incentive to exploit the newly opened waters. But for more than 100,000 Inuit who live in the Arctic, on and around the frozen ocean, an entire way of life is at stake. Development here threatens to upset the balance between their communities, land and wildlife, leaving the future of this region and their culture increasingly uncertain.

The National Geographic Channel EXPLORER series takes on the August 6, 1945, U.S. Air Force atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in this chronological retelling of the 24 hours following the event.

Documenting one of the greatest though least-known maritime catastrophes in history, this chilling program dives deep to get the story behind the Baltic Sea disaster of World War II. In the final months and weeks of World War II, when the German passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in January 1945, more than 9000 people, the vast majority of them civilian refugees from fighting on the Eastern Front, were sent to the bottom of the icy Baltic Sea.