What would the earth be like without the sun? We'll never know, but the emperor penguins come the nearest to that experience, as they suffer through winter in Antarctica, ...

Mountains are the most prominent products of the immense forces which shape the living planet: tectonic drift, volcanic activity and erosion by wind, water, frost and pre ...

Although merely 3% of water on earth, fresh water plays an important part in the planet's weather and erosion. It is immensely important for all non-marine wildlife, whic ...

The Earth's large, deep calcareous caves are virtually inaccessible and therefore barely explored - requiring expert diving where flooded. Some of its wildlife is as stra ...

A large and growing part of earth's land mass is covered in desert - each one widely varied in composition and dryness. Wildlife species have adapted in different ways to ...

The polar caps have the most extreme seasonal contrasts, growing and melting vast ice masses, so wildlife adapts by annual migrations. The majority of Antartica is a vast ...

A quarter of the earth's land mass, from arctic to tropical, are open plains consisting of lowland as well as highland plateaus. Here grows virtually indestructible, fast ...

On 3% of the Earth's surface, the rain forest is the habitat for half our animal species, even 80% of insects. So its wildlife is most competitive, like the birds of para ...

Shallow seas cover only 8% of earth's surface, but contain the richest, most varied maritime life: from plankton and coral (literally vital for the very existence of reef ...

Trees are earth's largest organisms and are also one of the planet's oldest inhabitants. Seasonal forests (unlike tropical rain-forest) the largest land habitats. A third ...

Open ocean, a vast biotope covering two thirds of the planet, some shallow, some as deep as the mountain ranges are high. The ocean has an immense, precariously complex f ...