This three-part series, which began airing on 24 January, is now available on DVD and focuses on the landscape and wildlife of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. At the end of each fifty-minute episode, a ten-minute featurette entitled Inside The Great Rift takes a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of filming the series.

Visible from space, Africa’s Great Rift Valley runs three thousand miles from the Red Sea to the mouth of the Zambezi. It’s a diverse terrain of erupting volcanoes, forest-clad mountains, spectacular valleys, rolling grasslands, huge lakes and mighty rivers, and is home to crocodiles, hippos, lions, elephants, flocks of flamingos and a diversity of indigenous peoples.

Using state-of-the-art high definition filming techniques, this series investigates the geological forces which shaped East Africa’s Great Rift and which make it one of the world’s most wildlife-rich landscapes.

The Great Rift Valley channels a huge diversity of waterways – rivers, lakes, waterfalls, caustic springs and coral seas – spanning from Egypt to Mozambique. Some lake and ocean deeps harbour previously unseen life-forms, while caustic waters challenge life to the extreme. But where volcanic minerals enrich the Great Rift’s waterways, they provide the most spectacular concentrations of birds, mammals and fish in all Africa.

Via: bbc