CBC The Nature of Things - One Ocean (2010)Part 4 The Changing Sea

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 4: The Changing Sea

In our final episode, The Changing Sea , we discover that the ocean is sending us clear signals. Off the rugged and beautiful coast of British Columbia we meet scientists and fishermen who are shocked at the recent arrival of a voracious new creature – the Humboldt squid. This monster-sized squid native to the equatorial waters of Mexico has moved north and ushered in a cascade of changes to the ecosystem. Their arrival is part of a disturbing pattern that is emerging with species movement being tracked around the world. In The Changing Sea we illustrate how the ocean’s chemistry and systems are being compromised by increased acidity, less oxygen and warming temperatures. The changes to the timeless rhythms of birth and renewal are being felt everywhere – even on coral reefs. In the idyllic waters of the Bay of Naples, we get a glimpse of our future ocean, thanks to the mythic Mount Vesuvius. As scientists swim through lush green seagrass beds, they collect creatures whose shells are dissolving, and we discover that this amazing place has a terrible secret. It has been naturally acidified for millennia – could this be our ocean’s future?

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