A website and virtual reality project linked to a series on risks to the Great Barrier Reef are aimed at the young generation

He may be approaching his 90th birthday, but there is little sign that Sir David Attenborough plans to slow down. “People ask me to do things. So why not? Really, that’s all,” he told the Observer on the launch of his latest project – a multi-disciplinary exploration of the 2,300km Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

The Great Barrier Reef: An Interactive Journey variously offers an outline of serious coral science, updates on the increasingly marked effects of El Niño, and even a Finding Nemo-inspired game. Designed to accompany Attenborough’s new BBC TV series, which begins on 30 December, the website is an attempt to reach an even larger audience. “New mediums, all used at once, give different platforms for kids who will never watch the TV series,” he said.

Another dimension of the project is offered by the Natural History Museum in London, which is staging a virtual reality experience – David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef Dive – in which he invites visitors to don a headset and travel to Osprey Reef, a lagoon on top of a coral mountain.

The website, which will be open for five years, will be regularly updated and include contributions from leading coral reef experts. “It is also aimed at a much broader audience, who may not before have taken an interest in the Great Barrier Reef,” Attenborough said. “If the temperature goes up by two to three degrees, which is quite likely, the number of corals that survive is very small. There will be a big die-off. It’s an issue desperately worrying to coral scientists working on the reef.”

The history of natural history programme-making has been about how technology has allowed you more and more insights.

The idea was created with the producer of the TV series, Anthony Geffen of Atlantic Productions. The involvement of Attenborough secured support from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, James Cooke University, University of Queensland, Australian Museum and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Updates on the temperature and weather are provided by Nasa and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Ken Johnson, coral reef researcher at the Natural History Museum, said: “The next two years are critical for coral reefs. They are already starting to bleach, as the algae that provide the colour are expelled or die. This is really well timed.”

Attenborough is evangelical about the ways in which technical developments have transformed the possibilities of nature storytelling. “I’m not very good at technology,” he said. “I use a computer, I have a mobile phone, but I don’t text, I don’t do email. I don’t have Skype, Twitter. I don’t do any of them. I don’t want to tell everyone where I am every moment of the day.

“The technology I’m interested in is the technology that allows you to bring the reality of the world [to people]. Technology enables you to go beyond the human faculties. Nobody, nobody at all, has been able to have such insight as completely as we have today. The whole history of natural history programme-making has been about how the technology has allowed you more and more insights.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Earlier days, David Attenborough with Neusi, a chimpanzee, at London Zoo in 1987. Photograph: Ian Parry/Rex

“There is really nothing, nothing we can’t get recordings, pictures and visual images of today, slowing down, speeding up, remote, from satellites, down to microscopes looking at the insides of blood vessels. Combine the versatility of cameras with the skill of wildlife cameramen these days. It is amazing.”

The television series aims to highlight the vulnerability of the complex coral ecosystem to warmer oceans and acidified water. The website will compare temperatures with those 30 years ago. Images from satellites capture swirling zones of red, hotter water drawing closer to the Coral Sea and the reef, and these will be shown on the site. There will also be the opportunity to see cyclones gathering pace before wreaking underwater havoc.

Geffen and Attenborough were concerned that natural history programmes, such as BBC1’s Big Blue Live: Monterey Bay last August – which featured unprecedented footage of a blue whale, the largest animal on the planet – fail to provide an online experience for viewers, and this spurred the new project.

In recent years, Attenborough has also pioneered the use of computer-generated images and 3D to animate fossils, through the TV programme First Life, to attract younger viewers. He is very aware, however, of the temptations offered by technology to cut corners. “It is a worry to me, absolutely. But it is not the first medium of communication to tell lies. The written word is just as convincing a liar, certainly as versatile a liar as film.” Ultimately, he said, it comes down to a question of trust. “It depends how you introduce it and what you say about it. So what matters then is the author. Is this naturalist telling you the truth? And I suppose you could say that is one of the few justifications of having people like me.”

So is he the gold standard? “I would like to think that is true. That is why I am very upset when there are stories deliberately slanted to try to make out that we are telling misleading stories.” It still rankles that his series Frozen Planet was accused of misleading viewers through using footage of newborn polar bear cubs filmed with their mother in a Dutch animal park.

BBC to mark David Attenborough's 90th birthday with special show Read more

“We weren’t talking about Winnie the Polar Bear. We put it in the credits and some inky-fingered someone or other said ‘There you are. It is a lie’.”

It will take more than the occasional spat with the press to dampen his enthusiasm. In the past year Attenborough has discussed climate change with President Barack Obama and made two visits to the Paris climate summit to stress the urgency over global warming, and has at least three new programmes in production for 2016. Britain’s nature knight is still at the top of his form.





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LIFE ON SCREEN

8 May 1926 Born in west London, the middle of three sons.

1945 Attenborough won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Natural Sciences.

1973 After a 21-year career at the BBC, rising to be controller of BBC2, he became a freelance broadcaster.

1977 Became narrator of the natural history programme Wildlife on One.

1979 Life on Earth, a groundbreaking series in which Attenborough told the story of evolution on Earth, was aired.

2001 Narrated Blue Planet, and then in 2006 Planet Earth was aired.

2010 Made Flying Monsters 3D, a documentary in 3D about pterosaurs.