Climate change is the biggest problem facing polar bears, and as sea ice has diminished
over the last three decades we’re seeing a very marked response in polar bear populations.
Bears are suffering because of loss of sea ice. The study that I’m doing out of BYU
is looking at the potential interaction of bears and people. I go up to Alaska in the
wintertime and monitor maternal polar bear dens. When you’re dealing with a white animal
in a white landscape buried inside of a cave you have an obvious problem of finding these
animals. When we first start out we go up there and we find the dens with forward-looking
infrared. There she is. I can see her moving. Do you see the two ears and the nose looking
at us, you can see her. . . There she is. She’s looking out. And we go and we set
up these kind of self-contained camera units and they just film the bears 24/7. At their
den sites some of them have a meter of snow over them. They’re so powerful they just
arch against the roof and they’ll shove a meter-thick block of snow up in the air.
You’ll see it come up and then it will tip over and their head comes out like a periscope
on a submarine. When they first come out the mothers will, they rub all around on their
back like a dog and they wriggle and they’re cleaning their fur on the snow, and the little
cubs will roly poly play around on the ground. The mothers just sit there and scan the terrain.
There’s a couple of times where they’ve noticed our cameras. This past year we had
one where they just kind of came up and sniffed it and we got a nice closeup of the cub’s
face. When the bears abandon the den we’ll crawl in and take measurements and just kind
of see, you know, what a polar bear den is and it gives us a better idea of what they’re
doing in there. To the folks back home what’s a bear den like? It’s got an odor to it.
Ugh. That's the first noticeable thing? Yeah. We’ve got some good scratch marks back here.
Well the benefit of this kind of long-term, ongoing study is we can see how their behavior
changes over time as the sea ice changes. We see bears moving off of sea ice, coming
on to terrestrial areas in order to have their cubs, and so now we have more humans than
ever, more bears than ever all jammed in the same zone. So we’re kind of in there trying
to sort it out to let them have their lives as undisturbed as possible. I go up and speak
on behalf of Polar Bear International. Nobody’s predicting that they’ll go extinct. What
they are saying is that their overall numbers will be diminished. Sea ice has a physical
relationship with the planet’s temperature and if we can reduce CO2 we’ll see a corresponding
response in the sea ice. There’s no question that we can do things to lessen our individual
impact on the planet. Whether polar bears are at stake or not this has always been good
counsel.