Ocean prospectors gamble it all on Bering Sea Gold

MANILA, Philippines - Watched by 3.66M viewers in the US, making it the highest-rated series launched in Discovery Channel history, Bering Sea Gold has now hit Asian shores. In the frontier town of Nome, Alaska, there is a gold rush taking over. For two million years, glaciers have been melting into the Bering Sea and depositing sediments rich with gold into its waters. As the ice melts in summer, the isolated town of outcasts and eccentrics booms with enthusiasm as pioneer dredgers rush out to the sea for gold mining unlike any other. Here, the precious metal is not found in the ground, it is sitting at the bottom of the frigid and erratic Bering Sea.

Bering Sea Gold, an eight-part series, begins Sept. 4 at 11 p.m., exclusively on Discovery Channel with encores every Wednesday at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and every Sunday at 10 a.m.

As we learned from Deadliest Catch, the Bering Sea is one of the world’s deadliest playgrounds and fishermen without survival suits will freeze to death with 60 seconds, making the margin for error extremely thin. Crazy? We will let you decide. On Bering Sea Gold, the brave miners in Nome willingly dive in day-after-day to dredge and scout the bottom of the sea from custom-built, barely seaworthy rigs, in a race to haul in as much gold as possible before the waters become too glacial to dive.

Bering Sea Gold follows four gold dredgers that range wildly in size and sophistication, but all have one thing in common: They are run by ambitious and often, desperate people whose very livelihoods depend on finding that one big payoff.