Polar bears are not only a great icon for the north,
but they also become the symbol for climate change and a rallying point.
Looking across the board at a whole number of things,
biologists have put together a chilling tale of the future of these bears.
Which everybody here would say is not one that we want to be a part of.
We want to do something, anything to try to stop that decline.
The work that we're doing here specifically
is focused on
new techniques for documenting bear den locations.
So the students bring the skills that we need to try out
this new technology, which is synthetic aperture radar.
Synthetic aperture radar,
the idea is you have aerial mounted radar,
and so we have a helicopter going out and it's sending out essentially
microwaves, pulses of energy, and then it's going to bounce off things,
and depending on what it bounces off of,
it's going to send a different amount of energy back.
We're here in Churchill
now because of the fact that it's the polar bear capitol of the world
and we have polar bears here that we can actually fly over.
We can get radar reflected data from them.
Then we can actually go to a denning area where we don't see the bears,
fly through there,
and with the same technique we'll be able to say, oh, that's a bear, that's a bear
because of the ground work that we did here.
We're putting up a corner reflector,
so we're able to get our ground truth for when we fly the helicopter overhead.
We'll get an accurate measurement of where we're at and
where the polar bears are.
Right now we're in a big tundra buggy,
which is basically a big old box on top of monster truck wheels,
and we're going out into an area of Churchill where polar bears often are.
There's a polar bear.
It's right there.
It's our first one for the day, so we're really excited to find one.
We're going to mark the GPS location,
send it up to the helicopter, and they'll fly over a bunch of times
and that way we can try different types of parameters
to try and get the best possible image, knowing there's a polar bear.
The helicopter has gone over two or three times now,
so we think we've got some good radar images of this bear.
Park next it and get a good visual and send the data up to the helicopter
so they're able to get a visual of the bear and also us in relation to it.
Never seen a polar bear before.
They are huge and just beautiful
and we're hoping that we were able to collect some good data.
Man, today was awesome.
I'm so excited to see what all the results are.
Once we got to campus
for the BYU Capstone team, the real work started where we actually
had to go and perform the image analysis. While we were in Churchill
The ground team saw about 21
polar bears, which is awesome.
Of those 21 polar bears, looking at the data later on,
we were able to image nine of them in radar.
And of those nine bears that we imaged, we were able to see the signature
in six of the images.
We've made a lot of progress.
You know, we've established that you can see a bear in a radar image
using synthetic aperture radar and now it's time to refine that process.
Hopefully we can use this
polar bear research and our findings to be able to help conservation efforts.
This world just wouldn't be the same without polar bears
and or without many of the other species that
make our lives so interesting and fulfilled.
I really feel deeply that it's an ethical commitment
we all have to see that these species live to see another day.