THE WHITE PLANET
For three long months...
I traveled to the end of the Earth...
to discover the White Planet.
I have faced glacial winds during
the polar night.
I have walked through desert glaciers.
I have listened, I have watched...
and the White Planet has told me
its secrets.
The lord of this domain does not
fear the coming winter.
She knows that the time has arrived
to disappear underground...
into her secret lair.
To the Inuit--the Arctic inhabitants--
the Aurora Borealis are spirits who dance in the sky.
At the dawn of the world, darkness reigned.
The fox loved the dark,
but the crow dreamt of light.
In order to please both, Sila,
the spirit of time ended the sole reign of night.
Thus, the White Planet was born.
The polar bear has been nursing her
young for 100 days in the dark, while eating nothing.
Finally, the March sun allows them
to leave the lair.
For the cubs, it is like being born again.
The male who approaches is a danger to the cubs.
The mother fears for the cubs' lives,
if the male gets close to them.
The White Planet is a world that defies
definition...it is neither land nor sea.
In winter, the Arctic Ocean is covered
in a thick ice layer.
This is the ice floe, territory
of the seal.
The elephant seals are neighboring strangers.
With fear and surprise, the small
white seals discover their world.
It spends three weeks with its mother...
to learn how to swim and dive.
Three weeks to discover everything on the ice
and, alone, the wrath of the ocean.
The Arctic Ocean, circling the North Pole,
unites several continents.
The tundra occupies almost everything
north of Asia, Europe, and North America.
But in the south, the climate is less austere,
and trees are able to grow.
In the boreal forest, winter still is not
over in the month of April.
The caribou can no longer stay here.
Today, instinct directs the caribou
to head north.
First, the females depart,
the males follow later on.
Thus begins one of the great
migrations of this planet.
On the ice floe,
the sun is finally here.
Three months have passed
since she last left her lair.
The mother must hunt without respite,
she has three mouths to feed.
Nine out of ten times, the attack fails.
The cubs are only thinking about playing,
but without knowing it, they are learning to be hunters.
Thanks to her experience, the mother, once again
has been able to feed her children.
The polar bear is entirely dependent on its
hunting territory, the ice floe.
In June, the White Planet is transformed by the sun.
For a few months, the snow disappears off the tundra.
The ice floe is reduced by half,
revealing the Arctic Ocean and its many islands.
On these immense fjords, everything appears calm.
Nevertheless, underneath the ice,
colossal forces are at work.
In the midst of chaos, mysterious heavy breathing.
The narwhal, creature of legend.
Winds and currents break up the ice floe.
Under the ice, a strange activity begins.
A pinch of light, an inkling of heat,
engenders life.
Attracted by plankton, boreal whales
penetrate the ice labyrinth.
But at any time, the passage can close up,
and the visitor may get trapped.
The whale has found an escape route.
She sings, to alert her companions...
several kilometers away,
and guides them to her.
The boreal whales filter the plankton without rest.
The White Planet nourishes the largest of creatures.
Other voyagers have traveled the Earth
to return to their birthplace.
The guillemots take pleasure in the ice.
In a fervent state, they approach the ice floe,
where the food is concentrated.
With a ferocious dive, they fly
to the depths of the ocean.
Under the ice, the belugas celebrate
the return of spring.
On the continent, the last snow
falls in June.
After two months of migration,
the mother caribous have stopped in a solitary valley,
far from wolves, to give birth.
Moments after birth, the newborn
can already stand.
After a few