SeaWorld Orlando to get new attractions

SeaWorld Orlando announced the most ambitious expansion in the nearly 40-year history of the theme park, including a sea turtle exhibit with a domed 3-D theater and an immersive penguin experience that promises to drop guests down in the middle of frigid Antarctica.

"TurtleTrek," with huge tanks of live sea turtles and manatees, will feature a first-of-its-kind domed theater with computer-generated 3-D images that will "put guests under water with the animals into an amazing journey into their lives," park president Terry Prather said.

The turtle exhibit will open sometime this spring, along with a new area called "Freshwater Oasis" at SeaWorld's adjacent swim-with-the-dolphins Discovery Cove. In a clear spring under a rain forest-type canopy of trees, visitors may swim alongside Asian otters and marmosets.

In spring 2013, SeaWorld will open "Antarctica -- Empire of the Penguin," which officials said is the largest single expansion project ever undertaken at the Orlando park. An artist's rendering shows shops and restaurants with an interactive ride at its center, similar to the successful Harry Potter attraction at Universal Orlando. The experience will include a radical temperature change, perhaps welcome in the steamy heat of Florida summer.

"This will be the coldest attraction ever constructed," promised Brian Morrow, the park's chief designer.

The projects are unique to the Orlando park. The changes at SeaWorld were announced as attendance at Central Florida theme parks continues to improve after suffering in a lingering recession and specter of a BP oil spill that kept visitors away from Florida in 2010.

SeaWorld debuted its first new themed Shamu show in five years in April, a little more than a year after a killer whale dragged a trainer to her death in the tank. The park is spending tens of millions of dollars on new safety features in preparation for trainers to eventually work with the animals in the water again.