The BBC has announced that world-renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough is to present Blue Planet II, the brand new seven-part landmark series from the multi-award winning BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit, which will be broadcast later this year on BBC Earth. Twenty years ago, a team of wildlife film makers from the BBC’s Natural History Unit set out to make a series on the world’s oceans, the breadth and scale of which had never been seen before. Broadcast in 2001, the multi award-winning The Blue Planet, presented by Sir David Attenborough, cemented the Unit’s peerless reputation for underwater filming.

Now, a generation on, the NHU has returned to these underwater worlds for Blue Planet II, with even more ambitious filming and a fresh cast of extraordinary aquatic animals, spending some four years filming off every continent, and in all of the earth’s oceans, to immerse the audience in some of the most expansive but least known parts of our planet. Blue Planet II explores the latest frontiers of scientific discovery, from icy-white polar seas to vibrant blues of the coral atolls, from the storm-tossed green Atlantic coastline to the black depths of the alien deep.