Remote and inaccessible, surrounded by steep mountains and riddled with unstable rock along five fault lines, New Zealand’s Doubtful Sound must be one of the most treacherous places on Earth. Here we follow one of the world’s toughest construction projects as revolutionary tunnel-boring machinery goes head to head with extremely hard rock to bore a 10 km tunnel.

Our urge to explore extreme places puts extreme demands on our bodies. Luckily new technology has created a branch of medicine designed to cope with inhospitable environments. We go along with medical teams in the USA, New Zealand and Canada as they prepare explorers for deep water, high mountains and outer space. Medicine doesn’t get any further out than this.

With over 133 billion litres consumed a year, the world consumption of beer is enough to have you staggering. This fascinating documentary goes behind the scenes to reveal the complexities of the volatile brewing process and how this ever-popular beverage is nurtured, coaxed to maturity and kept in check to quench the thirst of a world craving more.

Using archive footage, survivor stories, computer animation, and expert interviews, we expose the killer characteristics of natural disasters, leading to an ultimate disaster, a hypothetical but possible event of unparalleled force and impact. The four compelling episodes in the series are Earthquake, Tornado, Tsunami and Volcano.

Breaking through over 13 meters of ice demands an Icebreaker. These behemoths keep the world’s shipping lanes open during the harshest of conditions making them vital to the global economy. We follow the construction of a vessel that can break ice and carry cargo at the same time: The Arctic Icebreaking Containership; which is the largest commercial icebreaker ever built.

Enter the FPSO, a Floating, Processing, Storage and Offloading vessel - a high tech floating rig, designed to extract deep-sea oil from waters too dangerous for traditional oil rigs. It’s also the ultimate recycling project. This film follows the extreme makeover of the “Pioneer”, a rusty 17 year old tanker as it gets converted into a state-of-the-art FPSO.

Between earth and space is a world that scientists are just beginning to discover. There have been reports of columns of flame, blue tongues of fire and giant jellyfish shaped lights. Once the stuff of myth and fable, this “megalightning” is all too real and some experts fear some forms may eventually be found to be the culprit in a number of unresolved disasters.

As China roars back into world power status in the 21st Century, it’s proclaiming its growth and economic success in steel and concrete, glass and stone. Join us as we go behind the scenes of three of China’s most amazing mega structures: the Water Cube, Yangshan’s Deep Water Port and the 492-meter tall Shanghai World Financial Center.

Soaring a dizzying 610 meters skywards, Guangzhou's Sightseeing and TV Tower is on track to becoming the tallest television tower on Earth. It’s the testimony to the vision of a small architectural team who dared to dream big. Because of its complex high-tech geometry and lavish proportions, the Sightseeing and TV Tower will be the icon that puts Guangzhou on the map.