What can satellite imaging add to the natural history genre that we haven’t seen before? That’s the tough challenge the producers of the BBC’s new documentary series, Earth from Space, took on when creating the show. The first episode aired on BBC One on 17 April, and explored how satellite images are helping scientists to monitor the fragile health of our planet from space.
The view of the earth from space is often extraordinary, and within a few minutes of the show’s opening, the superlatives in the narration start coming thick and fast. Amazing, sweeping vistas of the Grand Canyon, the San Andreas fault and Uluru are sprinkled through the programme, as are stunning shots of cape fur seals, hippos in Botswana and foaling grey whales in Bahia, Mexico.
Earth from Space combines satellite imagery with heavy use of nature documentary footage. The camera makes you feel as though you’ve zoomed in from space, down through the valleys of the Hengduan in the Himalayas. As spring blossoms in the mountains we see the plants, trees and even the rhododendrons on the ground burst into colour – much to the delight of the resident Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys, who feed on the nectar. And we’re rewarded with some close-ups of the monkeys, for a conventional nature documentary pay-off.
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Using satellite imagery affords the chance to see the challenges different species face from the air, as well as from ground level. Now researchers can see emperor penguin poo from space – a nugget revealed during the episode – conservationists have a way to track emperor penguin colonies across Antarctica. Satellites can spot the brown emperor poo patches in parts of the landscape otherwise inaccessible to humans. They’ve used satellites to find 26 new colonies, doubling the known population of the species, and to monitor the colonies as they come under threat from climate change.
It’s difficult for any documentary about the natural world to not consider the impact of climate change on the environment (Earth from Space airs just the day before the David Attenborough documentary, Climate Change – The Facts) and here they’ve used the satellite cameras to demonstrate its effects on a family of elephants in the Samburu national reserve in Kenya, as they welcome a new calf into the herd. Drone footage shows the distance the herd has to travel to find water, before we zoom up and out to the satellite images showing the scale of the drought-hit landscape. The impact of these climate changes are that the herd goes days without water, and the elephants are forced to seek out the tiny patches of green we can see from space, risking predation just to survive.
There’s some visually arresting footage of mass human movements thrown in to Earth from Space too. Gatherings of Muslim pilgrims on the Hajj in Mecca, Catholics watching the Pope’s address in Rome and revellers at Glastonbury and Burning Man festivals can all be seen from space.
Watching Shaolin Kung Fu students during their drills is the most jaw-dropping shot of the programme. Satellites capture the movements of thousands of student during a coordinated performance, simultaneously creating patterns and shapes that are visible from space. It’s equally beautiful and terrifying, but the camera technique gives a sense of what humans and animals can achieve on the grandest canvas there is.
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