Full feedPolar Bear!
From Melanie, campaigner on board the Arctic Sunrise:
A few hours after arriving at 82.31 degrees north latitude, a polar bear was sighted wandering not too far off the ship’s port beam. As you can imagine when someone shouts out “polar bear!” a fair bit of mayhem ensues, we drop what we are doing, grab our cameras and run out on deck. My cabin mate, Faye, is on watch from 12-4 so she was asleep, but she’d given me explicit instructions to wake her if a polar bear was sighted. I crossed my fingers and hoped the polar bear would remain in sight for at least a few minutes more while I ran down below to wake Faye.
The first polar bear I ever saw was off the coast of Alaska in the Beaufort Sea in 1998. I’ve been lucky enough to see dozens more in subsequent trips to the Arctic. I will never, ever tire of seeing them in the wild. To me, they are the most amazing creatures on the planet.
The more I read about them, the more I am in awe of the unique way they’ve evolved from brown bears on land to marine mammals that live in the Arctic, from the way they hunt and travel to the way they regulate their body temperature. They are astonishing creatures.
What struck me yesterday is how gracefully polar bears move. We were lucky enough to have this three-year old bear meander along the ice edge just 20 feet (6m) or so from the ship for a good half hour while we all gawked and took hundreds, if not thousands of pictures. I kept snapping pictures as the polar bear walked, stopped and sat up, crouched down and sniffed the water, scooped up snow into its mouth as it ambled along, even bared its teeth at us. Every picture shows a graceful creature; none of the images show the bear off balance or looking awkward. Imagine doing that with a person walking along on uneven sea ice – you know you’d get a lot of images of the person looking awkward as they righted themselves and caught their balance.
I’m no polar bear expert but this bear looked fat and healthy, I could see the fat around its back half jiggle like ‘jello’ as it walked. Bears keep warm with a thick layer of blubber, and they depend on their blubber for periods when they can’t hunt, so a fat bear is a healthy, thriving bear. I have seen skinny bears with their ribs showing and it’s tough to watch.
As Dave wrote yesterday, one of the reasons we took the ship north to 82.31 degrees north latitude was to allow Arne Sorensen, our ice pilot, to get a first-hand look at the ice bridge that separates ice free Nares Strait from the multi-year, thick pack ice of the Arctic Ocean north of the ice bridge.
Once the ice bridge breaks, all of the multi-year ice will flow south into Nares Strait and potentially pose serious navigation hazards to the ship. After Arne had done his reconnaissance flight of the ice bridge, I was told to suit up quickly for a heli trip to see the sea ice myself.
This was a real treat, I am pretty passionate about sea ice and the Arctic environment and will jump at any chance to go to high latitudes for a fix.
At any rate, the point I want to mention is that I have never seen so many polar bear tracks in the sea ice. I’ve seen polar tracks before, but usually just one set, and days and months can go by between sightings. The sea ice I saw yesterday was literally cross-hatched with polar bear tracks where bears have wandered along the ice edge, then veered off to check out seal breathing holes and haul out zones in the ice, then around pressure ridges and then zig-zagging back to the ice edge again. It was no surprise that I also saw dozens of seals in the short flight, including the site of a recent successful hunt where a seal skeleton and skin were all that remained from a polar bear’s meal.
Seals are the primary prey of polar bears. Where you find seals, you find polar bears. I hope we see more polar bears in the next three months of this expedition, but if not, then I will be happy with yesterday’s morning visitor to the ship.
- Melanie
Photo: Greenpeace/Nick Cobbing
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Comments
Polar bears are amazing animals - we gotta switch to renewables to stop further global warming!
Posted by: Anonymous | July 1, 2009 10:21 AM
Following my tweet at http://twitter.com/hubject/status/2424248993 ...
Many healthy polar bears means many more healthy seals to feed upon, and many more fish to feed the seals. Many fish means generally water convergence, upwelling, whatever. Do we know the current patterns right now in Nares Strait, in surface and depth?
Posted by: bernard | July 1, 2009 8:26 PM
It's beautiful to see these creature's but it's a shame that were making them all disappear.
Posted by: Paul Laquerre | July 1, 2009 11:32 PM
They really are incredible animals. Too see them become extinct through the stupidity of human behaviour would be such a shame.
Posted by: Joe Clark | July 14, 2009 5:01 PM
Looks like you had a grand time with that polar bear - it beats a cruise ship to Alaska anytime! You also are an accurate and honest observer which is what a naturalist should be. I do wish I had some of your polar bear pictures to illustrate an article I wrote on global warming. I would of course credit you or your organization unless you don't want me to because of the content of the article. Because, you see, I am one of those Deniers for whom a new Nuremberg trial is being planned. You can get my article on ICECAP if you are allowed to read such subversive literature. Should you ignore your superiors and still read it you will learn things about climate that nobody else knows. I tried to pawn it off on Nature, Science, and PNAS, all to no avail. These journals are in the hands of your co-religionists and are not interested in publishing science any more. In the meantime the article grew so that I had to break it into two parts to get it online. But now back to polar bears. They are good at surviving and managed to live through the previous interglacial that was warmer than our present Holocene. Their real enemy is MAN because hunting is still allowed. There are quotas, though, which is better than nothing. In the fifties they were at the brink of extinction because of unlimited hunting but since the quotas were imposed their numbers have recovered. But these hunters are persistent and you can still buy a CD with the title of "Loaded for Polar Bears." It shows you how they hunt, kill, and skin them. I think you should reconsider your thinking about polar bears. They will manage any natural disasters that your imagination can spawn but need protection from this crazy hunting culture that is a remnant of the stone age.
Posted by: Arno Arrak | September 8, 2009 9:46 PM
Hi Arno,
Dave and Melanie are too far north to receive internet and can't answer your comment. I'll do it instead of them.
First, on the slightly disguised ad hominem against people like us trying to prevent catastrophe: we are not preparing a "Nuremberg style" trial for you. First reason for this is that, unlike the people tried at Nuremberg, you are not a war criminal, you did not start several wars and did not systematically murder millions of people. The second reason is that, believe it or not, we are busy people and we actually have better things to do that running after every single climate change denier out there (I'm only answering you because you because you posted here). We're working to protect this planet, and it's already a handfull. So, don't fear, our lawyers are not going to come after you anytime soon.
On the accusation that Climate Change is a religion: I was under the impression that a religion involved a God of some sorts (Climate Change only involves man) and faith without proof. We actually have plenty of proof, under the form of a lot of peer reviewed science, most of which was summarized in the 2007 IPCC reports. These reports don't even include the mountains of extra evidence that was put forward since 2007.
On not being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals: you'll have to take it with them. The point of peer-reviewed journals is that the community as a whole can spot errors that you didn't see. When a paper is rejected, most people try to be humble, correct their errors, and then try again. I have that happening to me every day when writing things for our website. If you can't take rejection, there's not much I or anyone at Greenpeace can do about it.
Anyway, back to polar bears. You are right in saying that through most of their history, polar bears have been mainly threatened by hunting. This is why they have been protected and quotas have been put in place. Many populations have come close to recovering. That's good. What's not good is that now they are threatened by climate change and in particular melting Arctic sea ice on which they depend for hunting. Don't take my word for it, ask the IUCN: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/22823/0
Now, if you want to use our photos, you should ask our photo library. They're the ones to handle that kind of things:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/picturedesk
Posted by: Juliette | September 10, 2009 9:19 AM