Underwater Worlds

Travel through drowned forests, vanished villages and sinking cities: the lost lands of our past, present – and future.

Steve Backshall leads a team of elite explorers - including world leading underwater cave explorer Robbie Schmittner, former Royal Marine Aldo Kane and diving camera operator Katy Fraser - into the wilds of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Under the vast jungle here is the largest unexplored network of caves in the world, comprising thousands of kilometres of passageways.

This six-part series presents the definitive history of archaeology, a 250-year worldwide odyssey that began with the unearthing of the ruins of Pompeii buried beneath the ash of Mt. Vesuvius. In a short time, archaeologists started pursuing very different objectives: some were treasure-seekers hoping to plunder antiquities of the ancient world; others sought to prove theories about the origins of civilization or the historical accuracy of Homer or the Bible; still others focused on humans themselves, trying to determine the age of the species.

The British Isles have a long, rich and celebrated seafaring history stretching from the earliest times through the victories of Drake and Nelson, the voyages of discovery and the defence of the realm by vessels of all types in the present century. Much of this history is recorded in literature and in museums but reaches its most tangible form in the large number of historical ships that have been preserved and are continually restored as monuments to a proud past.

No continent experiences seasonal change as extreme as North America. From tornados that roar across the prairies, to Arctic air sweeping through the humid, southern swamps - this is a land where pioneering animals thrive. In winter, lynx prowl the snowy Yukon for snowshoe hares, whilst Florida manatees seek hot springs to escape the freeze. In the creeks of Tennessee, fish build spectacular underwater pyramids to find a mate. Fireflies light up the forests during summer nights, roadrunners cruise the spectacular deserts of Arizona and polar bears leap from rocks to hunt beluga whales.

After last year’s first record with Serenus Zeitblom Oktett, Berlin’s Hyperdelia comes back with a second release – a lucid underwater music composed and arranged by Swedish composer Kajsa Lindgren.

Postwar artists and architects have used photography, film, and other media to imagine and record the world as a wonder of collaborative entanglement – to translate the world for the world. In this book, Janine Marchessault examines a series of utopian media events that opened up and expanded the cosmos, creating ecstatic collective experiences for spectators and participants.