Arctic Worlds

Zac is sent to the Great Icy Pole to investigate suspicious activities in the area. It's a freezing, scary place where your eyeballs can freeze in their sockets and your fingers can snap off! And if Zac misses his helicopter ride back, he'll be stuck there all winter.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Was she his red raven or just another cheechako, a tenderfoot from the outside world looking for excitement, or a news story in his remote Alaskan village? Rocky didn't know but was intrigued by the sassy yet compassionate young woman, stranded thousands of miles from her home with no luggage, little money, and no place to stay.

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.

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.

Travel north - beyond the Arctic Circle - to Barrow, Alaska, and meet the proud Iñupiaq people. For thousands of years they have hunted whales on the open sea, but now global climate change threatens their way of life. The whale hunt is about to begin, and you're invited to come along! Just as soon as the ice covering the ocean cracks apart, the whales will appear. Set out with the Iñupiaqs in their bearded-sealskin boats to hunt bowhead whales, and witness a tradition that has been followed for 3,000 years.

Published to coincide with the centenary of the first expeditions to reach the South Pole, An Empire of Ice presents a fascinating new take on Antarctic exploration. Retold with added information, it's the first book to place the famed voyages of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, his British rivals Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, and others in a larger scientific, social, and geopolitical context.

The English explorer Henry Hudson devoted his life to the search for a water route through America, becoming the first European to navigate the Hudson River in the process. In Fatal Journey, acclaimed historian and biographer Peter C. Mancall narrates Hudsons final expedition.

America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his best-selling In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen - the US Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842.

The North Pole, originally published in 1910, makes available Robert E. Peary's own account of his expedition in the Arctic. It provides hotly contested evidence that remains an indispensable key in deciding who deserved the coveted title "Discoverer of the North Pole". It is also a gripping adventure story that is impossible to put down.

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.

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.

Oona is on a mission! A baby beluga whale has lost her way from her family and needs help getting back to her icy arctic home! But Oona and her best friend Otto have never traveled from their warm ocean waters before. Will old ship maps and a compass be enough to lead them through the dangerous storms ahead?

Nanu, a lonely polar bear, searches for dinner. The ice is melting, and the animals are disappearing! During his search, he makes an unlikely friend with Toklo, a silly beluga whale! The friends work together with a native girl, Ahnah, as they figure out how everyone can work together to help Save the Arctic! This time, Bethany Stahl's interactive book immerses children in a fun and unique journey.

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.

This arctic adaptation of "This Is the House That Jack Built" follows polar bears, walruses, seals, narwhals, and beluga whales as they chase each other around "the ice that floats in the Arctic waters". Not only is the rhythmic, cumulative prose good for early learners; it is a pure delight to listen to. The "For Creative Minds" section helps children learn how these animals live in the cold, icy arctic region.