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Well this week and next, we are taking you on a journey to Earth's frontiers.

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Today, it's Madagascar where scientists have set themselves quite a challenge.

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Their objective is to document marine life and their sample size is the entire ocean.

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Becky Anderson has the story.

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Our oceans contain some of the oldest life on our planet and some of the most endangered.

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With species disappearing every day, a group of scientists from opposite corners of the globe

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have set themselves the task of cataloguing the DNA of every form of life in the ocean before it's too late.

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From Southern Madagascar, a cold region of fierce promontories, open bays and extensive algal belts,

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to England's North Sea, their common goal is to better understand the abundance of life in our oceans --

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past, present and future -- and use its DNA to create a bar code of life.

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Professor Philippe Bouchet leads a team of scientists from around the world who have gathered here in Madagascar.

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He's dedicated his life to discovering unknown species. On this day, he thinks he's made an important discovery.

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The catch of the day, not immediately identifiable with one of the known species.

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Hmmm. I don't know. Maybe it's still something different.

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Philippe and his team have already cataloged more than three and a half thousand specimens.

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Around one and a half thousand new marine species entered into literature every year.

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At this rate, the process of discovering, verifying and naming all remaining unknown marine species would take more than five centuries.

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On the other side of the globe, Professor David Rawson is involved in a similar project,

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to collect material from endangered fish species in Britain using a pioneering technique called cryopreservation

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to create a so-called frozen ark.

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This is to culture cells from the fin,

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and we can take it back to the lab and we can get cells to grow up from the fin clippings we're about to take.

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His research will enable future scientists to compare what once lived in the oceans with what lives there now and what will live there in the future.

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The big concern is that certain groups are particularly vulnerable to extinction and fish probably most of all, of all the vertebrate groups.

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Something like 30 percent of them are considered entirely vulnerable.

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Frozen ark is a way of preserving material in a more useful way than we did in the past.

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So it's a form of banking in --

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banking cells in a state where they can be held for hundreds or thousands of years at very, very low temperatures,

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particularly because liquid nitrogen, which is minus 196 degrees Centigrade,

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so extremely cold temperatures where, in effect, all life activity does...is in suspended animation.

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It is estimated that most species that become extinct have never been documented by scientists.

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Philippe and David know that they are in a race against time.

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I think many nations now recognize that their fauna and flora are as valuable to them as their mineral reserves and their land.

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It's an enormous task to capture everything.

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But a start has been made. And I think it's making us recognize the value of our biology that's around us.

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And when I was a student, my dream was to discover one new species.

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And, well, that dream has been fulfilled, I mean, thousands of times. In fact, nearly everywhere in the world,

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you...especially in the tropics, there are [is] still plenty to discover.

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And my experience with the tropical islands in the Pacific --

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and I have seen places early in my career, 20 years later, these habitats were gone.

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So, yes, there is a race against time.