Tag Archives: polar bears

Face-to-face with a polar bear

Leave a reply

Decorative photograph showing helicopter over glacierWhat would you do if you found yourself face-to-face with a polar bear?  Run?  Probably not a good idea because polar bears regard anything that runs away as a potential meal and they can reach speeds of 40 kph or 25 mph, so they can easily outrun you.  This question is probably theoretical one for most people, even though climate change is reducing the area of sea ice and forcing polar bears to forage on land, as far south as Newfoundland.  However, it was one that we debated when planning our expedition to Greenland where we did expect to encounter them [see ‘Perched blocks and muskoxen‘ on February 4th 2026].  We considered taking firearms; however, to be effective you need a high-powered rifle and it would have been challenging to transport several from the UK to Greenland so that each group had one available when we were not working together.  More importantly, we were visiting their domain and we had no desire to harm any polar bears.  As an alternative, it was suggested to us that, like us, polar bears find it difficult to run downhill at speed and so this was a potential escape route but, of course, only if you are on a steep hill!  In common with most animals, polar bears are frightened of fire so our chosen means of defence was to remove our shirt, douse it in the liquid stove fuel we were carrying, wrap it around one end of our ice-axe and set it alight as a flaming torch.  We did see polar bears while we were in Greenland, always in the coastal regions and never near to our base camp.  We kept our distance and moved cautiously so that our defence plan never had to be implemented.  Nowadays, the internet provides advice for polar expeditions, see for example the guide of the International Polar Guides Association.

Decorative photograph showing basecampImages: helicopter over Bersaerkerbrae glacier after delivering supplies to base camp (top) and base camp on the western lateral moraine of the Bersaerkerbrae glacier (right).  We never got close enough to a polar bear for a good photograph.

No snow at Christmas?

1 Reply
img-20161210-wa0002

Norwegian Arctic (Image by Sarah)

The algae in the Arctic Ocean are blooming earlier every year at the moment because the sea ice melts more quickly each Spring as a consequence of global warming. This observation was made by Kevin Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University and confirmed by Mati Kahru, an oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego using satellite imaging. But what’s good for algae is not good for polar bears or us because less ice deprives polar bears of a hunting platform and raises sea levels globally. A 1m rise in sea level would displace 145 million people, or the equivalent of about half the population of the USA. A 2 degree temperature rise would make the Earth as warm as 3 million years ago when sea levels were between 25m and 35m higher – the temperature in the Arctic in last month was 2.22°C above average for the time of year.  The extent of the sea ice in October was 28.5% less than average for the month. So while there will be snow at Christmas in the Arctic, there might not be in the future.

Our current engineering technology is both contributing to climate change and is inadequate to mitigate the consequences. These issues present a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems (quoting John Gardiner), and given the predictions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel, we have less than 40 years to replace the equivalent of 200 years of engineering development (paraphrasing Yoshiyuki Sakaki). So, the generation of students entering engineering at the moment are going to be engaged in race that’s more challenging and more important to society than the race to the moon that preoccupied the generation that preceded mine.

Sources

Carl Zimmer, Global warming altering the Arctic food chain, Taipei Times, November 27th, 2016.

Blockstein DE, Weigman L, The Climate Solutions Consensus. Island Press, Washington, 2010.

John Gardiner, founder of Common Cause cited in Friedman, Thomas L., Hot, Flat and Crowded – Why we need a green revolution and how it can renew America, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2008.

Yoshiyuki Sakaki, President, Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan, Keynote presentation at ICEE/ICEER conference in Seoul, Korea, 25th August 2009.