Project

Across the Great Divide

Jeffrey Barbee set off Across The Great Divide with boat maker/Captain Andre Watson and first mate Deon Tulleken, exposing the most striking hot-spots of biodiversity in the Atlantic Ocean before they disappear. It's the first of a series of journeys undertaken by the video journalist to highlight climate change and global warming.

These three curious adventurers will let you join them through the power of technology as they battle the elements and strike to the heart of urgent issues threatening our oceans. Barbee works with the New York Times, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Smithsonian Magazine and other publications creating reportage about climate change from the Arctic to the Congolese rainforests. The two-month voyage up through the Atlantic on takes them from the southern tip of Africa, to islands like St. Helena and ports such as Dakar, Senegal. Along the way the team will meet with scientists working with breeding whale populations, cover airport construction on St. Helena, work with climate-change mapping systems and many more exciting and controversial projects.

Lessons from the islands

In mid-winter three of us boarded a 55ft sailing yacht under Cape Town's Table Mountain to rediscover islands in the Atlantic and what they can teach us about coping with climate change. With the help of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and prompted by a dog-eared copy of The Song of the Dodo by the science writer David Quammen, we uploaded video segments of our adventure and thousands of concerned viewers joined the expdition through the website www.jeffbarbee.com.