Arctic Worlds

Whaling in the Arctic waters off Alaska’s coast was as dangerous as it was lucrative in 1897. In that particular year, winter came early, bringing with it storms and ice packs that caught eight American whale ships and about three hundred sailors off guard. The ships were imprisoned in ice with no hope of escape. With limited provisions on board the ships that hadn’t been crushed by the ice, there was little hope that these men could survive until warmer temperatures arrived at least 10 months later. Martin Sandler tells the incredible true adventure story of three men who were ordered by President McKinley to carry out an overland rescue in the dead of winter.

Between 1941 and 1945, more than eight hundred shiploads of supplies were delivered to the Soviet Union protected by allied naval forces. Each journey was a battle against the elements, with turbulent seas, extreme cold, and the constant dread of torpedoes. These Arctic convoys have been mythologized as defenseless vessels at the mercy of deadly U-boats—but was this really the case?

Nîso kisêwâtisiwak iskwêsak. Mâmawâyâwinihk namôya wîhkâc osâmi otinamâsowak. Âsponâtisiw, pakwâtikosiw maci-pisiskiw. Kakwâyaki misiwanâtan kihci-okâwîmâw. Maskawisîwin ohci âhkamêyihtamowin, êkwa tanisi isi aspêyimowin, sâkihiwêwin, tapahtêyimisowin mîna ahcahkowin ta-kî-pakitinam maskawâtisiwin êkwanima mosci kwêskinam êwako ôma pimohtêwin.

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.

Robert Falcon Scott and the men of his polar expedition were heroes of their age, enduring tremendous hardships to further the reputation of the empire they served. But they were also husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Now for the first time, and with unprecedented access to family archives, Katherine MacInnes retells the story of the race for the South Pole from the perspective of the women whose lives would be forever changed by it, five women who offer a window into a lost age.

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.

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.

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.

On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of 35 cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel - the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance.

In The Winter Pony, Iain Lawrence pens the mesmerizing tale of a young white Siberian pony who escapes a group of cruel masters only to enter the company of Englishman Robert Falcon Scott. Joining Scott’s men and their race to the South Pole, the pony is soon given a name, James Pigg, as he and the rest embark on a thrilling race to reach the bottom of the world - a race in which not everyone will survive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Partons à l'aube pour une balade dessins-musique dans le grand blanc et sous le ciel glacé. À travers les paysages de neige pure, d'arbres pastels ou toujours verts, on entend parmi les bruits et le silence de la neige, les chansons et histoires slamées de Nelson. Comme des contes originels, elles sont peuplées d'une faune tranquille, magique et maline, d'humains qui parlent l'inuktitut, et de belles louves qui chantent à la lune. Et, sous les étoiles, on dansera autour du feu pour fêter la nature préservée.

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.

One man’s “curiously thrilling joyride” of travelogue, history, and climatology, across a planet on the brink of cataclysmic transformation. As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the...

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?