Julian

Massive sinkholes are opening across the country – each larger and deeper than the previous one. First the family pets go missing, and anyone living near one of the pits, is reporting strange phenomena – the vibrations, sulphurous odours and strange sounds rising up from the stygian depths. Then come the reports of horrifying ‘things’ rising from the darkness.When the people start disappearing the government is forced to act.

Down there, beyond the deepest caves, below the crust and the mantle, there is another world. An old woman locked away in a Russian asylum has a secret - knowledge of a 500-year-old manuscript written by a long-dead alchemist that will show a passage to the mythical centre of the Earth. She knows it’s real because 50 years ago, she and a team travelled there. And only she made it back. Today, caving specialist Mike Monroe leads a crew into the world’s deepest cave in the former Soviet Union.

East Antarctica: the coldest, most desolate location on earth. Two-and-a-half miles below the ice cap is Vostok, a 6,000 square mile liquid lake, over 1,000 feet deep, left untouched for more than 15 million years. Now, marine biologist Zachary Wallace and two other scientists aboard a submersible tethered to a laser will journey 13,000 feet beneath the ice into this unexplored realm to discover Mesozoic life-forms long believed extinct - and an object of immense power responsible for the evolution of modern man.