In 1971 heavy rain fell across much of East Nebraska. In the summer paleontologist Mike Voorhies travelled to the farmland around the Midwest town of Orchard. What he was to discover exceeded his wildest dreams. It was a sight of sudden prehistoric disaster. Voorhies' digging revealed the bones of 200 fossilized rhinos together with the prehistoric skeletons of camels, lizards, horses and turtles.
Stephen Fry loves Louisiana. Four months after the BP oil spill, dubbed the worst ecological disaster in the history of America, Fry returns to the Deep South together with zoologist Mark Carwardine, to see what the impact has been on the people, the vast wetlands and the species that live there. What they find both surprises and divides the travelling duo.
Flightless parrots, burrowing bats, giant skinks and kangaroos in trees - on the isolated islands of the South Pacific, the wildlife has evolved in extraordinary ways. But island living can carry a high price, for when new species arrive, all hell breaks loose. And there lies a puzzle: why do animals perfectly adapted to island life simply give up the ghost? The answer is revealed by the remarkabl
Can polluted air on board planes damage your health? This episode of Panorama talks to pilots who have almost passed out at the controls and passengers who say they've been made ill by toxic fumes. The air breathed on airliners is drawn past the engines. It can become polluted by any leaks of engine oil.'Fume events' are rare but there are no accurate figures of just how many occur each year. Pa
Moorland, Somerset, an English village like any other. But last year this quite ordinary place had an extraordinary experience. It was the wettest winter in 250 years. Storms brought misery to large parts of the country, but nowhere was hit worse hit than the Somerset Levels. In the space of 24 hours a lot of people from the area lost everything, their homes and lives were washed away.The area
There is a theory that was once considered to be quite controversial, so much so that scientists labeled it absurd. It claimed that for millions of years the our planet Earth was covered entirely by ice, every inch smothered by nearly a one kilometre thick sheet. The temperatures would have been -40ºC all over, even in the tropic regions located along the equator. If this was indeed
They can occur suddenly and catastrophically, they have swallowed cars, animals and people. They have destroyed homes and few an unlucky few have become graves. These are sinkholes, all across the globe enormous sinkholes have cracked the earths surface like an egg shell devouring every type of terrain with a destructive force that defies imagination. In Louisiana a 40 acer monster has been consum
Shift is a journey. In an ever worsening natural world we feel that inaction is not an option. We’re not claiming to be climate scientist or journalist trying to tell a plain story, just a brother and sister out to see what all the fuss is about. We accept, and thus firmly believe, that climate change is real, man caused, and a horribly big mess. Our goals are really two fold, one to educate peopl
Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded – from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who ha