The Blue Planet
Pearl, 9.30pm
Continuing this fascinating look at the world's oceans, tonight's episode investigates how the moon and the sun have the power to pull the oceans around the world in the daily phenomena of the tide - a force that has immense influence on marine life in every part of the globe.
Nowhere is the power of the tide more evident than in river bores - where the ocean's tides overpower the flow of rivers and move a tidal wave of seawater upstream, sometimes for many kilometres inland. Breathtaking aerial footage follows the wave of a six-metre bore as it smashes its way up to the River Orion in Brazil - shattering entire trees at the river's margin.
The biggest movement of water on Earth is the daily tidal flow in and out of the Bay of Funny in Canada. Awesome aerials and time-lapse photography reveal the full effect of this water flow - immense tide races with standing waves and a huge daily inundation of hundreds of square kilometres of mud as the sea level changes by 16 metres every day - a flow of water greater than all the rivers of the world combined. This water flow concentrates plankton further offshore so that every summer huge numbers of marine animals travel to this area - herring, dolphins, gannets, whales - including the humpback (above) - and the odd surfer too, no doubt.
The Naked Chef
Pearl, 8.30pm
