Great Barrier Reef

David Attenborough returns to one of the planet’s greatest natural wonders with the technology to see it in an entirely new way.

In 1957, David Attenborough first scuba dived on the Great Barrier Reef — an experience he has described as the most magical of his life. Sixty years on, commissioned by BBC One and drawing on pioneering camera technology and the latest scientific research, he returned to explore it as never before.

Aboard the Alucia — a 56-metre research and exploration vessel equipped with a state-of-the-art Triton submersible, laboratories, and a helicopter — Attenborough took to the seas and skies to reveal the true extent of the reef’s diversity, complexity, and fragility. Satellite scanning captured the full 2,300km expanse of living coral. Revolutionary macro lenses, super-high speed cameras, and time-lapse photography unlocked a world of normally invisible life — creatures and behaviours that had never previously been captured on film. And unprecedented access to some of the reef’s most remote regions brought its most extraordinary inhabitants to the screen for the first time.

The result is a series that combined Attenborough’s masterful storytelling with some of the most ambitious and technically inventive natural history filmmaking ever commissioned for BBC One — a portrait of the world’s largest living organism that is as scientifically revelatory as it is visually breathtaking.