September 2006 - the start of the Arctic Winter and the beginning of expedition Tara, a voyage that will take an international team of elite earth scientists to the top of the world: Their mission - to search for explanations of global warming and try to slow it down.

The sailing ship Tara is about to become trapped by ice in the middle of the inhospitable Arctic Ocean. As freezing seas begin to solidify they tighten their frigid grip around her. We hear the creaks and groans of her hull contracting under enormous pressure and watch the crew frantically preparing for what’s to come. But this is no accident, and Tara is not about to be broken apart. She is here intentionally; her arrival has been timed to coincide with the beginning of the Arctic winter - when 14 million square kilometres of ocean freezes over and becomes a seriously hostile place. It will also be home to an intrepid team of scientists from all over the world. Tara was built to sail the seas but she was also designed to ride on top of the ice, her super-strong, aluminium hull is specially shaped to prevent it from being crushed and as the ocean freezes she rises up to sit on top of the ice.

Together this team will complete a complex, cutting edge scientific expedition with three simple aims:

To discover the  current status of global warming impact on the Arctic’s ice, sea and atmosphere.
To reveal what the future holds for the Arctic and the implications for the rest of our planet.
To try and find out what we can do to prevent these changes from creating a global disaster.

This is a unique mission to the very heart of our planet’s climate machine. This is not the theory and conjecture of global warming we’ve all heard before; we already know the Arctic ice is shrinking what we don’t know is how quickly. The object of this mission is to find out.
Into the heart of the climate machine is the real thing, it’s witnessing first hand, the profound changes that are happening now in one of the earth’s most remote places but one with that can impact our entire planet.

More info: http://www.taraexpeditions.org/

Available as:
Tara: Journey to the heart of the climate machine - 1 x 90' minutes
or
Future Earth: Journey to the End of the World - 1 x 50' minutes