Sea Shambles – Live at the Royal Albert Hall

STARRING

AND A WHOLE BOATLOAD MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED (AND NOT ANNOUNCED…)

Some Quotes

“Richard Feynman said that the imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of humans, and what we see living in the ocean is a wonderful example of the possibilities of evolution in extreme conditions. The delight in a child’s eye when it first sees that blobfish really exist is something to behold, in adults’ eyes too. I am sure I am not the only parent who watched Octonauts with their child and thought, “Hang on a minute, that creature can’t be real” and went straight to the internet to check up on the cookie cutter shark or snot sea cucumber. That we know so far more about our Moon than our what lies in our oceans means they remain a place of wonder and mystery. They also remain a place for alarm as we monitor the damage done by human activity. Like every show I get involved with, our aim will be to surprise and delight, to make us all ponder on what it is to be living on a planet with such vitality and such variety in its forms of life, its shapes and structures, its geology and possibilities. I stand ready to be gobsmacked again.” – Robin Ince

“Earth’s oceans are the heart of our planet, a giant blue fluid engine that drives our weather, produces half of all the oxygen we breathe, feeds us, and has shaped human travel, trade and adventure for centuries.  But life is different below the waves, and the creatures that live there have to thrive in conditions that are fundamentally different from those on land.  If you want to see alien life, you don’t need to wait for a ride to Europa or a far-off exoplanet.  Just hang out underwater on a coral reef at dusk and watch for the fabulous spectacle of an octopus out hunting: an independently evolved intelligence with a strange body shape perfectly suited to its weird world.  I find our oceans endlessly fascinating.  They encompass ten metre waves breaking over the bow of a ship in a force 9 gale, giant underwater waterfalls, the extremes of life on a black smoker and the beauty of the fragile single-celled organisations that form the rainforests of the ocean.  If you want to understand Earth, you have to understand our oceans.” – Helen Czerski

“Our oceans cover the majority of our planet, and yet still feel like an alien world. It’s a place filled with strange wonders, colourful conundrums, and biological marvels. Many of its darkest corners are still secret to us, with many great discoveries still out there. And yet we are in danger of killing our oceans before we even understand them. In the last few months alone I have glided over barren white reefs, bleached by warming waters. And fought to disentangle turtles, seals and seabirds from the cuffs of plastic trash. I’ve seen once-flourishing marine dreams, strip mined of their fish, a bounty reaped without any thought of future harvests. It’s time to stop seeing our seas as a foreign land. They, as much as rainforests, are the lungs of our planet. Protect them and they will rebound. Leave it too late, and we will have eternity to rue our mistakes.” – Steve Backshall