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Airdate: David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef

Nearly 50 years after he first visited the Great Barrier Reef, Sir David Attenborough presents a new series using cutting edge technology.

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Nearly 50 years after he first visited the Great Barrier Reef, Sir David Attenborough will present David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef, using cutting edge technology to go where no pioneering octogenarian has gone before.

ABC will screen the series from 7:40pm Sunday April 10th with The Making of David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef to air on iview from 8.40pm.

Nine still has its own Attenborough series The Hunt yet to premiere in HD, after amending its earlier schedules.

Sir David turns 90 on May 8th.

In 1957, Sir David Attenborough first visited, and scuba dived on one of our planet’s most extraordinary creations, the Great Barrier Reef. Shrouded in mystery, and mostly inaccessible, he always wanted to go back to further explore the ecosystem he describes as “like no other in the natural world”. Sixty years on, using brand-new technology and the latest scientific research, David has the opportunity to unlock the secrets of the Reef as he embarks on a personal journey that reveals the true extent of its diversity, characters and complexity along the way.

For this landmark series, David climbs aboard the Alucia, a 56-metre research and exploration vessel equipped with a state-of-the-art Triton submersible, laboratories and a helicopter. It will allow him to take to the seas, and the skies, to give a perspective on the Great Barrier Reef that has never been seen before, and unprecedented access to some of the most remote parts of the Reef and its magical residents and visitors.

David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef combines cutting edge scientific research alongside innovative filming techniques. By using the very latest infrared cameras, the hatching of the iconic clownfish is witnessed for the very first time, whilst time-lapse macro cameras will expose behaviour of the normally unseen tiny coral animals that built the entire reef, and also reveal the most magical reproduction event on the planet, the annual coral spawning. Furthermore, the programme will show how a shrimp with vision like no other animal on the planet views the natural wonder.

The Reef is home to some of the world’s most fascinating animals and David captures an array of creatures, such as the manta ray, the epaulette shark, which walks, and the humpback whale, which have made the Great Barrier Reef their home. The series also uses the latest satellite tracking data to follow incredible journeys, like those of the dwarf minke whales, green turtles and tiger sharks who travel thousands of kilometres to migrate there.

2 Responses

  1. Let me say it before someone else does – will this “cutting edge technology” allow us to watch this in anything other than glorious, slightly bit-starved, standard definition?

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