The Last Explorers

Archaeologist and writer Neil Oliver presents a series on the golden age of exploration, charting the routes of contact that drew together the farthest reaches of the world. Neil Oliver follows in the footsteps of four Scottish explorers who planted ideas rather than flags - ideas that shaped the modern world we know today.

In 1989, thirteen GDR scientists and technicians set off from East Berlin to the Georg Forster research station in the Antarctic. During their expedition the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th. Cut off from the images that go around the world, the men can only experience the historical events passively. When they returned in the spring of 1991, their homeland was a foreign country. The documentary reconstructs the thoughts and feelings of the East German researchers on the basis of eyewitness accounts, diary excerpts, letters, film material, grandiose landscape shots from the location of the action and unique photos to make the consequences of the events tens of thousands of kilometers away on the small GDR expedition in the middle of the eternal ice tangible.

In November 2014, filmmakers Leon McCarron and Tom Allen set off for Patagonia to follow the Santa Cruz river across Argentina. Their journey reflected on the past - using the diaries of Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin as inspiration for the expedition - yet also, crucially, it explored the uncertain future of the Rio Santa Cruz. Now two huge dams are due to be built on the river and it seems clear that they will drastically affect the natural ecosystem, and some predict that construction could affect the level of Lake Argentina - the river's source - and therefore become a threat to the iconic Perito Moreno glacier.