Based on the best-selling book by Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us is a superior underwater documentary. Produced by future "master of disaster" Irwin Allen, the film offers footage culled from several marine expeditions all over the world. The film's basic thesis: That mankind may someday face extinction when the polar ice caps melt and the Earth is covered with water. Most audiences weren't interested in the film's speculative passages: they had eyes only for such exciting vignettes as a fight between a shark and an octopus. Radio veterans Don Forbes and Theodore Von Eltz narrate. Gorgeously filmed in color, The Sea Around Us won the 1952 "Best Documentary Feature" Academy Award.