Like millions of other fascinated viewers, I watched the Discovery Channel television series Planet Earth in awe. The spectacular imagery was unforgettable. What I found particularly intriguing was the additional commentary at the end of each hour of the series, in which the techniques and technology used to attain the marvelous footage were described in enough detail to satisfy some of my technical nature. But—you knew there was going to be a "but" here—I must say that I was a bit surprised at the end of the "Oceans" episode, only to hear about the heroic efforts of the underwater camera crew who swam dangerously close to the whitetip sharks. The other episodes included a discussion of a gimbaled, helicop-terborne camera system and a balloon-based platform for cruising within inches of treetops. The message in these technical clips was clear: it's hard to film nature in the desert and in remote mountain environs. But the message in the ocean episode was very different: it's dangerous to film nature in the ocean. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that this is just one more instance of our need to convey to the out-rnside world just how difficult it is to conduct research and operations in the oceans.
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