Planet Earth - Episode 02 (Mountains) (ATOM Study Guide)

Planet Earth is a BBC production with five episodes in the first series (episodes one through five) and six episodes in the second series (episodes six through eleven). Each episode examines a specific environment, focussing on key species or relationships in each habitat; the challenges they face; the behaviours they exhibit and the adaptations that enable them to survive. Recent advances in photography are used to achieve some spectacular 'first sights' – in particular, stabilised aerial photography gives us remarkable views of migrating animals and the techniques used by their predators to hunt them.

As the series examines pristine environments where possible, they are often extreme. These are the parts of the world where few humans have chosen to live as the climate and landscape is too challenging, too difficult and dangerous. The plants and animals that do survive here have made some spectacular adaptations in forms and behaviour to live in these far reaches of the planet.

The series is suitable for middle secondary students studying Science and SOSE, and for senior secondary students of Biology, Environmental Science and Geography.

In the second episode we travel across the high peaks of the Earth's mountain ranges to see the animals and habitats that survive at high altitude. Some of the rarest animals are found here and their lifestyle is filmed in detail, often for the first time. The processes that form, shape and erode the ranges are examined in detail, in particular the great glaciers.

This time the journey begins in Africa at its lowest point – the Danakil depression in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia where the earth has split, volcanoes have formed and chemicals bubble to the surface as new land is made, creating lakes of sulphuric acid. This same volcanic action forced up a massive dome mountain formation, the Ethiopian highlands. This is the homeland of the gelada baboons who have adapted to the high country by becoming grazers on the high grassland, roaming in herds by day and sleeping on the cliff faces by night.

Across the Atlantic are the Andes of South America, formed as the Pacific Plate slides beneath the continent and forces it upwards. In the south, the Patagonian highlands experience extremes of weather, even in summer as a female puma with her grown cubs stalks guanacos, a type of llama. In North America a similar drama takes place in the Rockies when a female grizzly bear emerges with her two cubs. They must feed quickly but they climb and seek out an unusual source of food, the large, fat moths that hide among the loose rocks of the slopes.

In Europe, the high Alps are bare of life and snow, they are carved into jagged shapes by glaciers that gouge out huge valleys. But the biggest glaciers are in the Himalayas, the highest and largest mountain range on Earth. Wild goats leap across the faces of the peaks pursued by the magnificent snow leopard, its family life filmed for the first time in the wild. Other predators such as wolves and huge eagles make life precarious for these goats.

At the far end of the same ranges, in China, the giant panda feeds, and feeds, in the struggle to get enough nutrition from its poor diet – huge quantities of bamboo. In another first, we see film of a wild panda nursing her single cub deep in her mountain den. Finally we fly with the cranes as they attempt not to settle in the mountains but to cross the high Himalayas in their annual migration south. This time we experience an aerial hunt as eagles select, stalk and take their prey in the clear, cold mountain air and watch as the survivors clear the final peak to begin the long glide down.