Polar Bears at Sea

By Andrew C. Revkin
swimming polar bearA polar bear photographed in waters off Alaska — but not during the survey in the news. (Credit: Geoff York, WWF)

In a wrenching scene in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary that propelled a wave of interest in human-caused global warming in 2006, a polar bear slowly slips beneath the waves to drown. The sequence was animated because no one had, so far, captured photos or video of drowning bears, which some environmental groups described as victims of climate change.

While reporting a story at the time on the intensifying battle over climate attitudes, between those trying to convince the public to embrace cuts in greenhouse gases and those fighting such a move, I interviewed David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who said the group was eagerly seeking such photos. As far as I know, images of drowning bears haven’t been widely seen. But after reports that someone doing an aerial survey for bowhead whales in Alaskan waters spotted around 10 bears swimming well offshore, the World Wildlife Fund distributed an unrelated picture (above) of a swimming bear, taken earlier this month, to drive home the idea that melting ice is making times tough up north.

Felicity Barringer, who’s been covering the recent listing of the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, has written a news article on the offshore sightings. It’s been clear for a long time that, other things being equal, polar bears have a much easier time when Arctic waters are sheathed in ice to provide a platform from which to hunt and kill seals. But the bears’ offshore habits, both in the water and on the ice, are poorly understood, according to Scott Schliebe and Steve Amstrup, federal polar bear biologists who have amassed several decades of bear studies between them. More federal money for offshore bear studies, they told me last year, could clarify how unusual long swims, and occasional drownings, might be.

In the meantime, the latest news will serve, I’m sure, to heat up the climate fight, providing powerful imagery for climate campaigners and more ammunition for foes of greenhouse gas restrictions who argue that such imagery belies the marine mammals’ resiliency in both watery and frozen seas.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Allan August 22, 2008 · 6:49 pm

Polar Bears are not threatened and are, in fact, almost to nuisance levels in Canada.

Bears are bears and their vast roaming patterns are well known and those patterns do not change when water is introduced in habitat.

Male bears will traverse a wide ranging area swimming when they need to and walking when they don’t. Females stay closer to home but both wander an incredible amount of space.

ming bucibei August 22, 2008 · 7:04 pm

By the way extinction is a natural process

There are more extinct species than there are existing species!

One should neither prevent nor expedite a specie’s extinction?

There is always change, and adaption or non-adaption to that change

ming bucibei

Dano August 22, 2008 · 7:22 pm

Cue the denialist fringe congratulating each other over the latest thing they have grabbed on to, exaggerated, conflated and tortured to maintain their relevance.

Best,

D

Mike Roddy August 22, 2008 · 7:24 pm

Polar bears are likely to go extinct by about 2050 as the world warms by 2 degrees celsius. These bears are indeed magnificent, and will be missed in ways we won’t understand until after they’re gone.

Getting sidetracked about discussions concerning how far they can swim is just sick obfuscation being propagated by deniers who want to discredit any global warming science.

The fact is, we are already in a major period of extinction, exceeding anything seen since the dinosaurs disappeared. Roughly 50 species per day are going extinct, and it will get much worse as global warming accelerates.

This is hard data. I have no interest in listening to irrelevant quibbles about specific animals.

Richard Courtney August 22, 2008 · 7:32 pm

The text clearly states that there is no documentation for drowning bears. Why must they create fictional animated sequences to fool the public?

joann flathersom August 22, 2008 · 7:38 pm

that was a great message i mean it really spoke out at me i just totally luved it !!!! please send more of these articles so i may read them and enjoy every last minute of them because these articles are now the center of my life and i would not want to let my life down cuz i rock!!!!!!!!!!!! HARD!!!!!!!!

Jonathan Katz August 22, 2008 · 7:50 pm

Polar bears are known to zoologists as ursus maritimus, or sea bears. They have webbed feet, and have been spotted swimming many miles from shore for a long time. A healthy polar bear will not drown.

The only part of their life cycle that cannot be completed at sea is denning, giving birth to cubs, and the cubs’s first several months of life. But they cannot do that on sea ice either; it must be done on land in a well-insulated den. Polar bears may be endangered by hunting, but they are not endangered by the retreat of the summer Arctic sea ice. No one is predicting an end to sea ice in other seasons.

Charles Wohlforth August 22, 2008 · 7:55 pm

While Schliebe and Anstrup, both terrific scientists, might say more reserach is needed to say how far bears can swim, I think they’d also agree that bears can’t swim hundreds of miles. In this incident and a past well-documented case, bears were seen far off shore, perhaps dumped by melting ice, and with marginal chances of getting to safety even with smooth water. Unfortuneately, the water isn’t often smooth on the Arctic Ocean. In the earlier incident, many bears clearly drowned when wind and waves came up while they were far from shore. They swim with thier noses just above the water and can’t go long in high seas and spray. After the recent incident, the survey aircraft was grounded by weather, and it seems probable the same thing occured again. Yet this is only one way that lack of sea ice could kill off bears. As these scientists have told me, there simply is no credible scenario for bears to survive in a world without sea ice.

Wayne Hamilton August 22, 2008 · 8:00 pm

Andy, re. your lead image…I really hate it when someone photographs an animal undergoing life-threatening stress from a damned helicopter hovering overhead going whap whap whap and throwing spray in the animal’s eyes. That’s the same view those suffering flood survivors on rooftops in New Orleans had of news cameras and politicians.

Wang Suya August 22, 2008 · 8:15 pm

From Wang Suya

It is right to show people how global warming is serious and polar bear is drowning. If there is no real image to show people, people will not feel it’s serious. A lovely polar bear is drowning, will die, it can stimulate people sympathy. It is showing global warming with imagenation. It is not that we do something to get people sympathy, it is reality, actrually polar bears are losing their inhabitate and are going to die. Last year Arctic ice melting many videos showed that polar bears are standing one ice were floating on the sea. It shocked so many people, at least me. Global warming is really happening, therefore Arctic ice is melting. As Laurie anwered Danny question at other thread, this year Arctic ice melting is simuler last year even is not like last year heavily. One year new ice do not endure the hot weather and soon melt away. We are sad and worry about it. Big oils are glad this chance to drill our final holly. Why people are so greed? Not first to sympathy the polar bears, first think how to get benefits from others tragedy. What a dirty person.

TPS Reports August 22, 2008 · 8:30 pm

What a tragic photograph. We understand why the bear is in the water, yet cannot help. The bear needs help and does not understand why it is in the water. Does it know its fate? It looks so helpless.

Jack L. Herz August 22, 2008 · 8:31 pm

The people who are predicting the details of, and the consequences of climactic changes are the same people who cannot predict the weather next week, or with any detail or resolution next month.

They are also the same “kinds” of people who predicted the next impending ice age in the late sixties-early seventies.

Climate change is good for getting funds for research by professors,and funding graduate students in the publish or perish academic environment.

As a scientist, I am not yet convinced either way in this controversy. Fifty years doth not a trend make, particularly when the timeframe should be five hundred years.

Having said this, we need to cut way back on our consumption of imported hydrocarbons. In fact, we should be on a hydrogen economy (non-hydrocarbon based hydrogen, e.g. from solar sources). Burning a valuable chemical raw material as fuel makes no sense at all.

However, giving China and India a “pass” is also wrong. Why are we not hearing the global warming-carbon footprint folks grumble about two coal fired plants being commissioned weekly in China. Where are the letters to the editor? Where are the editorials? Why are environmental groups not up in arms while we are being pushed to export jobs even more rapidly.

We should have non-tarrif import penalties equivalent to the cost of the imputed environmental investments we have made meetng the standards to which we are held in the U.S. and Europe.

We should also use the tax code (onerous per gallon taxes for gasoline inefficient vehicles, no “farm vehicles” exceptions)to drive the market to fuel efficient cars even more rapidly.

Hummers are totally socially irresponsible, in any form.

J.L. Herz, Ph.D.

Steven Earl Salmony August 22, 2008 · 8:36 pm

Too many of us are having difficulty seeing the “big picture” threat that global warming is presenting to the family of humanity. Even if we set aside the perversely politicized question regarding what is inducing global warming, the colossal challenge looming before the human community remains unseen. The implications of this failure are, at least potentially, profound.

Wayne Hamilton August 22, 2008 · 8:36 pm

I stand corrected on Obama’s energy and climate advisers. Dan Kamman has a physics PhD and seems OK. I’m relieved about physics and hoping he’s a renaissance man.

Gerry August 22, 2008 · 8:38 pm

I would be willing to drill right through a polar bear for more oil.

Sanjong Thapa August 22, 2008 · 8:44 pm

The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7037671.stm

green train wreck

(Andy, aren’t you going to do a piece on the big $5-Trillion crack in the ice on Greenland?
//www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aeu5ZbUSdOkc&refer=exclusive )

Elizabeth B. August 22, 2008 · 9:23 pm

I am sure I am not the only one to weep upon seeing this photograph. Use it for all it’s worth.

CoolPlanet August 22, 2008 · 9:47 pm

EARTH MATTERS

“Each day I remember that I am not wrong because I come back to understanding that every stream is now contaminated with carcinogens. I come back to the fact that wild salmon, who survived millions of years of ice ages, volcanoes, the Missoula Flood, for crying out loud, are not surviving one hundred years of this culture. I come back to knowing that there is now dioxin in every mother’s
breast milk. I come back to knowledge that tigers, great apes, and amphibians are being exterminated…..I know what I want. I want to
live in a world with more ancient forests every year than the year before, a world with less dioxin in mother’ breast milk, every year than the year before, a world with tigers and grizzly bears and great apes and marlins and swordfish. I want to live on a livable planet.”
Derrick Jensen,
“endgame”
volume 1
pages 419 and 421

A friend is organizing to fight a new toll booth on the Maine Turnpike. She tells me that her best recruiting tool is an artist’s rendering of the proposed toll booth lifted from the turnpike’s web-site. Human impact on the environment is so large and move’s in rhythms to slow for any photo to capture effectively the horrors that surrond us. Sadly, what we do to the polar bear and salmon and cod fish and forests….we do to ourselves.

Finally, check-out this image:
( //www.threadless.com/print/1253/Permafrost_Pollution_Print)

Josh August 22, 2008 · 10:08 pm

The Planet Earth series by the Discovery Channel has video of a polar bear dying because of the melted ice sheets. Not sure which episode, but the bear swims for days, can only find an island of walrus(es?), so it goes after the big tusked fellas and meets its demise. Guess this isn’t a drowning but the video blames global warming for the long swim to find food which led to the death by tusking.

Cynthia August 22, 2008 · 10:08 pm

Thanks for returning to this topic Andy. People interested in this post might be interested in polarbearsinternational (dot) org which has collared bear tracking and compare their locations in the Beaufort sea to the current condition of the Arctic sea ice such as at the National Snow and Ice data center, nsidc (dot) org or the University of Bremen maps. It’s not pretty.

Note to the WWF photographer: the image is distressing, in part, because of the surface chop caused by the aircraft. Aren’t conditions already difficult and stressful enough for the bear? The
WWF should do better than to add to the animal’s torment, however briefly.

Russell Potter August 22, 2008 · 10:10 pm

Although images of polar bears at sea may seem innately plaintive, the sea is in fact their element, as their scientific name — Ursus Maritimus — signifies. Polar Bears can swim, dive, and thrive in the water over enormous distances and times. What they can’t do on the water is hunt — they hunt and feed in the ice-shelf environment — so they could very well starve as that environment shrinks, and their natural prey such as seals also lose habitat. For all these reasons, we are unlikely to see one drown at sea. The point, in any case, is about populations and ecosystems, not somebody’s idea of a poor dear sweet bear — though no doubt the imagery would be powerful in symbolic ways quite beyond ecological ones.

George Mobus August 22, 2008 · 10:32 pm

Andy,

The real story is human psychology. In a past posting you wondered if there shouldn’t be a research agenda about human nature. I really feel there should be. But I also suspect that the truth will not be welcome. All evidence points to mankind’s over abundance of cleverness (intelligence + creativity) and lack of wisdom (sapience + tacit knowledge of how the world works).

How else do you explain the continuing saga of failure to understand what is happening and the lack of will to do what is necessary?

Question Everything
//questioneverything.typepad.com/

David J Evans August 22, 2008 · 10:47 pm

Human Induced Climate Change aside (which is not easy to do considering its magnitude and implications), Polar Bears are likely being driven toward a more maritime existence as well as being driven further out on the Ursus family tree as a more distinct species and possibly genus.

That is, we (our generation) are likely witnessing firsthand the ecological pressures that produce new species:

The evolutionary processes that produce a new critter under the sun; a new entry for the great book of the earth’s bestiary…

Will Ursus maritimus, the polar bear (formerly Thalarctos maritimus), become the next mammal to become a more marine-like marine mammal as Andy alluded to? (Will selective pressure develop a polar bear with more paddle like feet or other marine adaptations?)

Placing the polar bear population (or part of it) in an environment more dependent on open water than solid ice or land AND separating an arctic population from the subarctic one by a greater distance are key ingredients to ending up with a new separated species.

The problem is that even under the evolutionary concept of punctuated equilibria, the rate that the arctic is changing does not give the bears time to ‘evolve’ via ‘beneficial’ mutations and adaptive selection if the change continues at this pace.

We are more likely to lose the polar bear. We are likely to lose the image we have of the ice bounding arctic bear and lose Ursus maritimus altogether. No arctic bear at all. No white bear. No maritime bear.

It is sad that it takes something like drowning bears and losing a species (yet another) to understand and respond to the magnitude of Human Induced Climate Change.

Are we really Homo sapiens? the ‘thinking’ and ‘aware’ Ones? or are we instead just Homo economicus? all about the bottom line even if it doesn’t really make sense?

strider643 August 22, 2008 · 10:49 pm

Poor polar bear.

scotsmor August 23, 2008 · 12:17 am

Well ain’t that interesting: an animated depiction of a drowning polar bear. Kinda shows how bogus Gore’s film is. Polar bears are amazing, resilent creatures. They have been known to swim 60 miles or more in the ocean. Let’s get the real evidence first.