CBC The Nature of Things - One Ocean (2010)Part 1 The Birth of an Ocean

One Ocean

The Series Description One Ocean is an ambitious, provocative and stunning four-part documentary series that portrays the ocean more completely than ever before, revealing its awesome beauty and extraordinary power. The series, special effects and striking pictures shot in HD explores how it is that the ocean holds the very key to all life within its silent and shadowy depths. In each breathtaking episode we bring to life a vast, interconnected ecosystem: from the diversity and significance of microscopic plankton, to the sleek power of the Ocean’s top predators. One Ocean joins expeditions of discovery that take us to tropical coasts, to the deep, churning sea, and to meet strange and mysterious marine life that most of us will never get to see. We reveal a secret world beneath the water’s surface: energized with purpose, order, and the drama of survival. Complex environments inhabited by an astounding array of life forms, alternately splendid and graceful, are revealed like never before. Disarming, bizarre and plainly profound – One Ocean bears witness a world that is at once intricately beautiful and achingly vulnerable.

Part 1: The Birth of an Ocean

In The Birth of an Ocean we travel back to ancient time, telling the story of the ocean’s turbulent beginnings, and its successive incarnations. It’s a journey that introduces the enormity of the ocean over space and time – at four billion years old the ocean is nearly as old as the planet itself. In a remote part of Western Australia, we venture to the stunning, crystal blue waters that harbour the descendants of the first life on earth. These formations once covered the ancient seabed, and today they give scientists a remarkable window back in time. Traveling forward, we discover that almost 99.9% of species that ever lived on this planet are now extinct. On the lush and diverse Osprey Reef, we swim alongside scientists to learn why one remarkable creature – the nautilus – has survived, for millions of years, what countless other species could not. In The Birth of an Ocean we trace our own profound connections to the ocean with Tiktaalik , the “fish-a-pod” that scientists believe is the missing link between the ocean and all limbed creatures, including us.

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