Voir Wild Europe, Series 1 - Episode 2

The Ice Age. A period of extreme climatic change which profoundly shaped many of the stunning landscapes around us today - everything from the fjords of Norway to the dramatic peak of the Matterhorn, and from underwater caves in Majorca to sand dunes in northern Poland. Towards the end of the Ice Age new animals shared their world with our ancestors, modern humans, who arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago. It was also a time of giants, both geological and biological. Kilometer-deep glaciers carved their way across the continent, sculpting the land before them. With real time-lapse photography and graphics we take you under a glacier to see how ice carves solid rock with glaciers growing and receding before your eyes. But this ice had another great power – it sucked up water. The English Channel and North Sea dried up, becoming vast tundral valleys roamed by reindeer, bison and mammoths. And even today, trawlers fishing off the cost of Holland regularly haul up their bones which have been lying on the ocean floor for tens of thousands of years.