Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
‘Blue Planet II’ team dives deep
In the second episode of “Planet Earth: Blue Planet II,” debuting Saturday, camera crews descend 3,280 feet into the icy waters of the Antarctic in a pair of submersibles to find creatures that look like creations for a sci-fi film.
“I always say all the aliens are right here,” says filmmaker and underwater explorer James Cameron when discussing the BBC America nature documentary (during an interview for his own AMC series, “James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction”).
“Nature has had a lot of time to experiment in the oceans and come up with some amazing physiology, like the fish with jelly in its head so it can look up,” says James Honeyborne, the executive producer of “Blue Planet II.”
Indeed, down in the Twilight Zone (an area where only a bit of sunlight can be glimpsed) and the Midnight Zone (where there is no sunlight), there is a wealth of life. Many of the creatures create their own light and use it to communicate.
“Scientists actually think now that bioluminescence is the most common form of communication on the planet,” says Honeyborne.
As Cameron notes, we have known about bioluminescence in the oceans for years, but it’s only recently that we have had the technology to go to those depths with cameras able to capture the phenomenon.
“We were working right on the edge of what we know of the deep ocean,” explains Orla Doherty, who produced “The Deep” episode and went down in one of the submersibles. (It would take an hour each way to descend and return, and they would stay down for about 10 hours.)
“We were constantly seeing things that scientists thought could happen but have never really seen, like the squid eating each other, the methane volcano, and these seven monster sixgill sharks ripping apart sperm whale carcass.”
The decaying sperm whale had sunk to the ocean floor, and within a halfhour, the first of the blunt-nose sixgill sharks, which can grow up to 25 feet, was there. Not long after six more arrive and a feeding frenzy occurred, with the fish jostling and nipping at each other, once bumping the submersible, which it may have taken as a competitor.
Once those creatures finished, others moved in and soon the 30-ton whale was bones, and there were even tiny animals working on that.
“Blue Planet II” is already a big hit in other countries, including the UK and China, where its content was watched more than 100 million times in its first 13 days, according to BBC America.
The series was a four-year project. It mounted 125 expeditions, visited 39 countries, and filmed on every continent and across every ocean. They spent over 6,000 hours diving underwater, filming everywhere from familiar shores and using robots and probes for the deepest seas.
Honeyborne proudly notes there are at least 12 scientific papers being written as a result of their work.
They developed new technology to get shots unobtainable before, including “sucker cameras” to put on the backs of animals. Honeyborne says they worked with scientists who have the permits to do that and that the devices are not just cameras but record all sorts of other useful information for scientists as well.
They operate like a sucker fish,” he elaborates, “and can be placed on the back of a whale when it comes up to breathe. Then, after a period of time, the little piece of metal erodes, allowing the camera to come up to the surface where it can be retrieved.”
One scene where it’s put to use shows orcas in arctic waters teaming up to hunt a school of herring. From overhead, drones capture the swimming patterns of the whales as they herd the fish, and a sucker camera puts you in the action as the orcas use their huge tails to smack the water and stun the herring, allowing the whole team to share.
“Blue Planet II” presents a number of examples of unexpected behavior in the aquatic world, such as a tuskfish, which uses a coral anvil to crack open a clam — essentially a fish employing a tool.
The series narrator, 91-year-old naturalist Sir David Attenborough, has seen more than his share of wonders in the wild, but he was impressed by a scene in which giant trevally, which can get up to 5 feet, hunted birds.
Even with the light being refracted, the fish are able to calculate where the birds are going to be,” he marvels, “They’re going to have to take off in order to catch it. I mean, it would take a bank of computers to do that, and yet that’s what the trevally does. And you see it. It comes out of the water and, wallop, it gets that bird. It’s quite extraordinary.”
All of this survival of the fittest stuff lends itself to drama, which is augmented by an inventive score composed by Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea and David Fleming.
“We tried to figure out how an orchestra could play stylistically different that would be more appropriate to the nature of water. New colors,” says Zimmer, an Oscar winner who wrote the theme for the series and is the composer of scores for “The Pirates of the Caribbean” series, “Gladiator” and “The Dark Knight” trilogy.
“The water’s an ever-changing entity, so we took our cue from that,” adds Shea.
Fleming points out that some of the scenes are like little movies themselves.
“So then it was about finding ways to go back to the theme and how to apply it to these sometimes funny sometimes horrifying stories,” he says.
One possible horrifying story is the effect climate change is having on the oceans, something that is touched on throughout the series but is the focus of the last episode.
Last week, a 25-inch yellow-bellied sea snake was found in Newport Beach. It was the third time the venomous serpent has turned up on South California beaches since 2015. Before then, it was rarely seen in these waters, and many see it as a sign of climate change.
“Marine species move around as temperature changes,” observes Honeyborne. “In the UK, we are now getting Mediterranean species. They have to move to adapt to changing conditions.”
Honeyborne acknowledges that climate has changed before but never at such an alarming rate. While filming the coral reefs the sea temperatures rose for two years straight, which is putting pressure on the delicate ecosystems.
Meanwhile, the extent of summer sea ice has been reduced by 40 percent in the past 30 years, he says, something illustrated by a scene in the series in which a herd of walruses and a polar bear work to keep their cubs alive.
One thing that “Blue Planet II” does for sure is bring the audience into a world they barely knew existed.
“If aliens landed on Earth, they would see us as the outliers and the animals in the deep ocean as the rulers of the world,” says Doherty.