- 11 years ago
Documentary (2008) 53 minutes ~ Color
On Thin Ice: A moving account of polar bears struggling to survive as climate change melts their summer hunting ground - the Arctic sea ice.
With predictions of polar bears being extinct in 50 years, ON THIN ICE follows bears as they emerge from their dens and navigate their rapidly changing environment. ON THIN ICE shows how the frozen expanses of the Arctic are shrinking at an unprecedented rate, with the very survival of the polar bear literally on thin ice.
Over the last year, producer/presenter Greg Grainger has mounted a series of expeditions across the Arctic to document the plight of the polar bear.
Stars: Greg Grainger
On Thin Ice: A moving account of polar bears struggling to survive as climate change melts their summer hunting ground - the Arctic sea ice.
With predictions of polar bears being extinct in 50 years, ON THIN ICE follows bears as they emerge from their dens and navigate their rapidly changing environment. ON THIN ICE shows how the frozen expanses of the Arctic are shrinking at an unprecedented rate, with the very survival of the polar bear literally on thin ice.
Over the last year, producer/presenter Greg Grainger has mounted a series of expeditions across the Arctic to document the plight of the polar bear.
Stars: Greg Grainger
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Alone and terrified, this cub is just six weeks old, close
00:29by, mother lays helpless. Stunned by a tranquilizer, scientists attempt to rescue. It looks cruel.
00:52Truth is, it's meant to save the polar bear as a species. What these scientists are finding
01:01is that polar bears are losing weight year after year. They're slowly starving to death.
01:14The chief culprit, global warming. Right across the Arctic, global warming is casting an ominous
01:25shadow. The greenhouse effect, created by the mass burning of fossil fuels, has meant
01:32surface air temperatures in the Arctic have risen up to 4 degrees over the past 50 years.
01:38As a result, the Greenland ice cap, the world's second largest ice cap, is melting at an unprecedented
01:44rate. Every year, there's 9% less sea ice than the year before. Polar bears need that
01:55ice to hunt their favourite meal, seals. Less ice means less time to hunt. Less time to
02:10eat. The research that we have and the information that we have, it doesn't look a good story
02:15for polar bears. Polar bears worldwide need to have a certain amount of body fat in order
02:21to reproduce. They can survive with less, but if they're trying to reproduce, they need
02:28more body fat. So as the polar bears become leaner and leaner, reproduction is going to
02:33become poorer and poorer. Life on the ice has always been tough for the polar bears.
02:43While they have adapted superbly to these conditions, these days they're finding it
02:48tougher and tougher to get around. Not only is there less ice, but what's left is getting
02:57harder and harder to cross. Satellite imagery shows the reality of the bears disappearing
03:09hunting ground. The sea ice in summer has been shrinking to the point it covers 20%
03:16less than it did three decades ago. And there's every sign the ice will continue to disappear.
03:24Climate modelers are now telling us that the sea ice may disappear entirely in the
03:29next 50 to 100 years. And if that happens, that means that polar bears would have to
03:34retrace 80,000 or more years of evolutionary history in 50 to 100 years. And that just
03:41doesn't seem very likely.
03:43Ahead, we investigate the plight of the polar bear. Bears so hungry, they're on the prowl
03:51for human food. Residents so worried, they're on guard for starving bears. And scientists
04:02so concerned, they're tranquilizing hundreds of bears every year for research. We know
04:07for sure that the population here in Western Hudson Bay is certainly having negative impacts
04:12from climate change. I'm now going to look at the wear on the canines. We'll make alarming
04:16discoveries. Bears shot as they charge to tourists. Bears that haven't survived. And
04:28we'll join rangers as they scare off menacing bears. Witness the confrontation between famished
04:38bears and huskies. And watch a family of bears evacuated from an arctic town. The future
04:49of the ice bear, as we're about to discover, is literally on thin ice.
05:18These ice bears are ever such magnificent creatures. In size, they stand so tall, the
05:23biggest of them almost twice as large as me. And their heads are this wide. The size of
05:29individuals may be that big, but the size of the world's population of polar bears is
05:33in fact shrinking. 22,000 of them now estimated across the Arctic. Here in Hudson Bay, the
05:39population is shrinking down from 1,200 back in the late 80s to only 950.
05:46In the wild, the ice bear is a formidable creature. The world's largest land carnivore.
05:56A powerful hunter. A natural born killer. Ring seals, their favourite meal. Yet with
06:09its hunting ground disappearing, it's looking for new sources of food. These huskies look
06:16like an easy target. But the dogs put up a vigorous fight. This is an isolated Norwegian
06:38weather station at Hopen Island, deep in the Arctic. Come night, the bears will try
06:46again. And again. The polar bear remains determined. The dogs defy it.
07:16It's now late summer on Hudson Bay. For the past five months, with no sea ice to hunt
07:30seals, the bears have been marking time, waiting for the sea ice to form again. It's this time
07:37of year that the bears are in a playful mode. They'll rise to their hind legs to spar, repeatedly
07:44charging one another. But their numbers are well down this year. We've got only 35 bears inside 200
07:53miles of coastline. In past years, the count averages right around 95 to 140 bears. So quite
07:59a drop here and everybody's asking where have all the bears gone. Stuart Weber has been studying the
08:04bears at this remote coastal lodge of Nanook for the past nine years. We're located here at 137
08:11miles from Gillam, Manitoba by air. Four wheelers and an open trailer brings you down to the level
08:17of the bear. Everybody wants to come and see the polar bear. This time of the year, they're hungry.
08:23They've been fasting for a while now. I've never had any bear come after you, but ones that person's
08:30got a watch for is the sow and the cubs. On account of she's only trying to protect her, her babies,
08:36like any mother will do. They'll dig back into the sand and as you dig down in you can see that the
08:44sand is wet. On the hot days, they'll dig down into the beachhead here because they don't want to exert
08:54themselves in any way. They're just gonna conserve as much energy as they can. The Cree used to live
09:00up and down this coastline here, travel back and forth, live off the land mainly on the moose, the
09:07caribou, we got the birds, we have the geese, we have wolverines, the wolves, the foxes, like the red fox, of
09:18course we have the Arctic fox. There is a bear around that we've kind of nicknamed Monster Huge
09:24Bear and he's a big guy. He pulled the flag down and chewed on it. This was something I told the girls
09:30wouldn't last two weeks, but it lasted almost a month until he got a hold of it. I don't know how
09:36high up that would have been, but pulled the tails off of it. The fence is eight feet right here at least.
09:43Two flags that got pulled down earlier, they're all chewed up. A US flag and a Canadian flag. The bear
09:51numbers may be way down this year, but those that remain are still very curious. Remember, this is the
09:58only animal on earth to actively hunt humans. We're almost like we're the attraction at the zoo here
10:04inside the fence. The bears are coming to view us instead of us going to view them. It might be the
10:10only place in the world that you can do that with polar bears. As long as he just eats pie, we're okay.
10:16I was beside the sign and all of a sudden, he was after me and Stewart pulled me away.
10:28In the waters of Hudson Bay, the bears get to swim with another fascinating creature. Beluga whales
10:51congregate on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay over summer, some three and a half thousand of them.
10:58And while it's common to see bears and whales swimming in the same waters, they normally keep
11:03apart. It's a different matter when a baby beluga whale dies and washes ashore. This bear has not
11:11eaten anything substantial for an entire season. The whale represents a feast. Ravenous bears are
11:18not what the authorities in Churchill approve of. They'll do whatever it takes to discourage the bears.
11:25We have a bear line set up in the community, three of us on call at all times during the
11:28active bear season. A special patrol polar bear alert is headed by Sean Beaubier.
11:37We'll respond and try and move the bear away from the area.
11:41Nine zero Churchill, there's a bear down at St. Mary by the shore. Roger, thanks.
11:49We administer the polar bear alert program. Bears always a threat, so we'd like to remove
11:54them from the area. Polar bear alert program is spelled to protect human life, property,
12:03and as well protect the bears. This season started early, we started having bears around mid-July.
12:09But it will carry through till freeze up. Where the last chunk of ice came close to shore,
12:14happened to be close to the town of Churchill, so the bears got off the ice close to Churchill.
12:19Probably about a two or three year old bear looking for something to eat.
12:22Last year, the last sheet of ice went out 80 to 100 miles away from the community,
12:26so we had a relatively quiet season with not very many bears around.
12:32We're going to try and move them along the coastline, chase them across here with the
12:34cracker shells.
12:43We get a variety of bears that come in and cause problems.
12:46The younger bears that have just been removed from their mothers are obviously
12:50more curious and they're looking for something to eat, so
12:53only if it's an ongoing problem, then the bears can be darted.
12:56We'd put a green dot between their shoulders to let hunters in the north know that that bear's
13:01had drug in it. They shouldn't eat it, the meat might have some residue in it.
13:17Up in the air, another team flies out to survey the Hudson Bay bears every year.
13:23The World Wildlife Fund sponsors this project, with Canadian scientist Nick Lunn and team
13:28planning to tranquillise and measure eight bears this day.
13:32The Hudson Bay polar bear population is the one that's the most studied.
13:35Part of a Canadian commitment to signing an international agreement on the conservation
13:40of polar bears back in 1990, is that we're going to have to do a lot of research on polar bears.
13:47This is the population that Canada started looking at and have continued ever since.
13:59You've got to determine the bear's body weight.
14:01Based on the body weight, that's how you determine how much drug to give.
14:17All right. Here we go, sliding down.
14:22All right, got him. Got him? Okay, awesome.
14:25I'm just going to turn and I'll slide in here to the bear's left.
14:31Looks like he's heading towards that pond. Okay, I'll come around. Okay, there we go,
14:35we've got him turned out. Move around to the back. I'll move away, this time he'll get around.
14:40Is he staggering at all? Okay, there he is, there's his first stagger.
14:44Okay, oh, that looks good.
14:47Okay, looks like he's starting to sit. I'll slide out now.
14:51All done. Okay, awesome.
14:59Is this the guy that was in the water, do you know, that we saw? Or
15:02looks like an adult male. He's got a little bit of head movement.
15:05Hey bear, up. The head is the very last thing to go down.
15:08Hey. I'm just removing the dart. Dart has a small barb on it, so it stays in the bear,
15:15otherwise they wouldn't get all the drug. One of the side effects of the drugs is you get sort of
15:20thirsty, you're catching them in the snow, they'll start eating snow and flicking their lips and
15:24stuff, and that's just one of the indications that he is actually drugged. You should always
15:28just look around. There are lots of rocks out there and there are bears moving around, so you
15:33should always just keep your eye open. We caught the bear before, it'll have a tattoo in its lip
15:39and or tags in its ears. This bear was first caught in 1999 as a lone yearling just down the coast.
15:47This is a bear that we've caught pretty much every year since 1999, all in this area. We don't often
15:54find bears that we've never caught before. So Wayne, this bear is eight years old. I'll just
16:00get a temperature on him now. 36.7. At 11.16, that's a good temperature. He's not overheated
16:08at all. One of the things the drugs do is lowers the breathing rate of the bear. If it gets too
16:13low and the bear gets hot, then he has a difficulty getting rid of excess heat. 18 breaths a minute,
16:19he's fine for us to continue doing our work on. We're now going to take some standard
16:23measurements. We're measuring the skull width at its widest part. 258.
16:31Skull length is 403. I'm now going to look at the wear on the canines. All four canines
16:40are all a one out of three. There's little or no wear and these are in really good shape,
16:44but the overall other tooth wear is also a one. Another sign, A, that this bear is a young bear.
16:49As bears, especially males, get older, canines get broken in fights and these sorts of infection
16:53that gets in. Another thing we look at is overall scarring pattern. Again, out of one to three,
16:59with one being light or no scars and three being a heavily scarred bear, he's a one out of three.
17:05He's probably not of the stage yet that he's gotten into many, if any, fights. Females out
17:10on the sea ice, he doesn't have any fresh cuts, so that's a one as well. We also take what we
17:16call our fat index. You just sort of feel along the spine and whether or not there's any
17:21fat on the bear. If we were to score a bear one, one would be basically a bag of bones,
17:26no fat on him at all. In the early 80s, we certainly got lots of females that were sort
17:30of a four and five out of five. Now they're sort of more threes and fours out of fives. They're not
17:34in the same shape as they were 25 years ago. This guy's in really good shape. He's got lots of nice
17:41fat on him. If we catch a bear that might be scored as a two or a one this time of the year,
17:45that we wonder how they're going to make it through given that they still have two and a
17:49half months to go. Starting to move his head a little bit now. He's been down for about 40,
17:5345 minutes and one of the first things you see when the bear starts recovering from the drug
17:57is movement in the head. It'll take two to three hours before he's really starting to shake off
18:01all the drug, but you can see he's sort of resisting when I open up his mouth. Those are
18:05all good signs that he's well on his way to recovery. We're just about done with this bear.
18:10Observing the tranquilizing operation is WWF official Tonja Folkestad.
18:16This is the first time I see a polar bear and certainly the first time I touch one.
18:20WWF is first of all supporting the research here in Hudson Bay because it's the best
18:25studied population in the world and it's also the first population that is showing that it's
18:30being impacted by climate change. There is less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean now than
18:35ever recorded before and it's been like that for a few years. The sea ice is on a long-term
18:40declining trend. At the moment the polar bears are on a path to extinction and that's a path
18:46we've made for them. While measuring this bear, Nick Lund makes a disturbing discovery.
18:52Very well consumed. It's not a big bear. This is the first that I've seen. You find every now and
18:57then pieces of old polar bear bones like leg bone or something, but I can't say that I've
19:02come across a carcass here. One of the premolars is gone. There's a good chance it's been handled
19:07before. The ability to find tattoos or anything. He's got an ear tag. Oh he's got an ear tag. Last
19:13year we found a bear that starved to death. It's possible that's the same for this one. He's got
19:18an ear tag so with a bit of luck we can find out who this bear was. 17287. We'll go back and check
19:26him out. We can come back here. This guy's not going anywhere. That bear has been partially
19:31consumed, but almost certainly have been by other bears. There's not a lot else out here.
19:35There are arctic wolves but it's hard to know. 17287. Okay this male bear was born in the year 2000
19:43so it would have been six years old this year. It's had a lot of handling in and around the town
19:49of Churchill. In 2001 it was at Churchill Motel. In 2003 it was at Pizza Hut. It was at the Marine
19:56Tank Farm across from the big green elevators in 2004. And in 2005 it was in the flats just
20:03outside of town. So this bear had a long history of being in and around the town of Churchill. Six
20:08years old and he's a bear no more. Polar bears evolved to exploit the sea ice habitat. So all
20:16the polar bears are dependent on having sea ice as their primary habitat. When you look at sort of
20:21the various climate change and sea ice prediction models, it paints a very bleak picture 50 to 100
20:28years down the road. Polar bears are a sea ice animal. That's where they get their food. They
20:33hunt seals out on the sea ice. If there isn't sea ice there won't be polar bears.
20:51From high summer to the depths of winter.
21:05It takes just eight weeks for this transformation. The arctic winter has arrived with a vengeance.
21:13But it's a winter that is slowly getting shorter. The reality of climate change here on Hudson Bay
21:20is that the sea ice is breaking up one week earlier every decade. One week less time the polar bears
21:28have to go out and hunt their favourite food, ring seals. One week less feeding means they're
21:34slowly starving to death.
21:37On the western shores of Canada's Hudson Bay, the polar bears are gathering.
22:08Waiting for the sea ice to form so they can once again hunt seals.
22:24It's been five months since they last ate properly. Understandably they're starving.
22:31Hungry enough to risk their life to reach food.
22:37Sharp nails on the top of a garbage truck have not deterred one hungry bear.
22:41If the bear jumps out right away they're going to have to start blasting right away.
22:47Hey Jay, just stay away. In that mess I haven't got a shot.
22:53I can't tell.
22:55I can't tell how that happened.
22:58I can't tell how the hell he got in there either.
23:02The biggest hole is like this big.
23:04I know, and it's a big bear.
23:06Well during the course of the night a polar bear has broken into our garbage truck.
23:10We've got a number of deterrents on it but he still managed to find a way to get in there.
23:14We've got a number of people coming out today to view polar bears but we want to just manage the situation
23:18so we have control of that one for the moment.
23:20We had it happen last week and we reinforced our garbage truck.
23:25We put a number of nails on. The church will welcome Matt as they say.
23:29But obviously this bear has found ulterior ways to get involved.
23:33Morning Daryl.
23:35It's in there.
23:37It's in the garbage truck.
23:39It's in the garbage truck?
23:41Yeah, I opened the door in the shed to throw some garbage in this morning and I had a very nice wake up call.
23:45I wonder if he went in the back side and slipped through off the barrels on the back or something.
23:49Maybe, but he's jumping around in there.
23:51Oh I know.
23:54We're here to see polar bears in the wild.
23:56We certainly don't want anything to happen to this polar bear that's negative.
23:58But we've got to manage the situation as best we can at this point.
24:04When we start up the engine my only concern is however he got in he might bolt.
24:08What we'll do is we'll move all the vehicles back and then we'll have a guy on both sides.
24:12So we've got to make sure he's going that way.
24:14Yep, that'll work.
24:18Go, go, go!
24:24I can't see a thing.
24:26Go that way, go that way, you're clear.
24:42Beautiful, so it should work every time.
24:44Yep.
24:46Thanks guys.
24:48This drama has all taken place at the launch site for these giant vehicles.
24:53They're known as tundra buggies.
24:55Purpose built vehicles used to take tourists and scientists out along the coastline to see the polar bears in the wild.
25:09One of the scientists we're travelling with today is Steve Amstrup, polar bear project leader for the Alaska Science Centre.
25:18Polar bears are fantastic.
25:20Large white carnivores living in a really, what appears to us to be a bleak environment
25:26and just trying to get a handle on how they survive out there is pretty fantastic.
25:32I mean, you go out on the sea ice and it looks like a moonscape.
25:36There's no obvious evidence of life out there and yet suddenly, wow, there's a real wild polar bear.
25:45And they're making a living out there.
25:47It's pretty spectacular.
25:57Here we've got a couple of sub-adult male polar bears that have been wrestling around the lodge here for several days.
26:03And actually they've been called the Scrappy Twins.
26:05They're a classic set of sub-adult male polar bears.
26:09And they seem to have a lot of extra energy.
26:19They rest like this one is doing here now for part of the day and then they'll go at it.
26:25And they're just having a great time.
26:28They rest like this one is doing here now for part of the day
26:32and then they'll go at it for about 20 minutes, a half hour, doing some pretty serious wrestling.
26:50You come out here on the shores of Hudson River,
26:53You come out here on the shores of Hudson Bay and you see a lot of polar bears
26:57and most of them look pretty good.
26:59Those are not the animals that are most affected.
27:01It's the very young, which we haven't seen very many of around here, and the very old.
27:08It's the very young, which we haven't seen very many of around here, and the very old.
27:11The middle age animals, the prime age animals are still doing pretty well.
27:15One of the things that is most impressive about them is how they catch seals.
27:19One of the things that's most impressive about them is how they catch seals.
27:22Out here in the sea ice, they'll be sort of meandering back and forth along the snow
27:27and suddenly, boom, they head right towards the seal lair and smash into it with their paws
27:33and lo and behold, they pull a seal out from underneath the snow.
27:37In the last 25 years or so, we've lost over a half a million square miles of sea ice in the polar basin in the summertime.
27:51Polar bears are dependent on that sea ice for just about all of their life cycle needs.
27:56Not only do they have less ice to hunt on, and they've got ice for shorter periods of time to hunt on,
28:05but they've also got longer distances between the shore and the pack ice and poor substrate for denning on the sea ice.
28:15In recent analysis of the data that we've seen from northern Alaska,
28:20what we've seen is that females are producing cubs at a fairly high rate, but the cubs aren't surviving.
28:27And that's sort of the classic first thing that you'd see in a large mammal.
28:31They'll continue to try and reproduce, but if the cubs aren't adequately nourished
28:37and if the cubs aren't of adequate weight, then they don't survive as well.
28:41And what we've seen in northern Alaska in the last 15 years or so is a major shift
28:46to poorer and poorer survival of cubs of the year during their first six months or so of life.
28:54If sea ice disappears entirely, it seems unlikely that polar bears could survive.
29:00Polar bears can't move back into a terrestrial environment because the terrestrial environments are already full of grizzly bears
29:07that would be effective competitors, and because the terrestrial environments aren't rich enough
29:12to support the large body mass of a large number of polar bears.
29:16So it's likely that if sea ice really did disappear entirely, that we would indeed lose polar bears as a species.
29:31As the average weight of polar bears slowly comes down, so too does the size of their litters.
29:39Mothers with three cubs were once common, but these days litters are down to two or even one cub.
29:50These cubs were born around last Christmas. They're now 10 months old, and along with mother,
29:56they're slowly working their way along the coastline of western Hudson Bay.
30:00What they're about to do is to take the cubs to their mother,
30:05What they're about to encounter is the township of Churchill, built right on their migration route.
30:11We have a mom and cubs in the waste transfer station.
30:14Someone had left the door open to the garbage bin where they hold all the waste for the town.
30:20She got in there with her cubs. One of the town employees went in there with a truck and chased her out,
30:25and now she's in the kind of tundra area below the holding facility.
30:29So we're going to go out there and move them off away from the area, chase them towards a small bush there.
30:35Hopefully they won't return, and we'll go from there.
30:38They've been hanging around there for about a week, so.
30:40We just finished like three weeks, we didn't have a bear call.
30:43And then we've had maybe 15 this week.
30:49In the last week or so, I don't know, probably six or so maybe.
30:55They've come too close to humans.
31:10Ranger Sean Bobia will attempt to frighten them away.
31:24Sean believes he's moved them on.
31:27It's that time of year, I mean, they're scavenging for food wherever they can get it,
31:31just prior to the ice making up.
31:33So hopefully this will be enough of a deterrent to keep them away.
31:37But one of the cubs is very hungry.
31:40Within minutes of Ranger Sean's departure, this cub leads its mother and sibling back to the smell of food.
31:47The danger is it's an area frequented by people.
31:51I mean, everyone hauling their garbage away, so it's not a safe place to have them.
32:01This family is clearly starving.
32:04They'd normally be well out on the ice and hunting seals by now.
32:08But the ice has yet to form.
32:10They're experiencing global warming firsthand.
32:22They've now reached the waste treatment facility, and their hunger is audible.
32:34For the best part of an hour, they try to break in.
32:38For the best part of an hour, they try to break in.
33:08We're on our way to the recycling facility again.
33:23One of our trucks was over there and saw that Mother and Cubs was backed up by the buildings.
33:43So if we can move them off and keep them safe without putting them in the holding facility
33:47it would be great.
33:49So we'll try and move them off and if they come back we will likely immobilise them.
34:16On the other side of Churchill, more bears are threatening residents.
34:24Hold bear alert.
34:25Hello, are you guys aware there's a bear coming and showing at Johnsville right now?
34:29No we're not, but thanks very much for the call.
34:31OK, take care.
34:32There's a bear coming off the sea ice by the sounds of things.
34:34We've got trappers down.
34:36He might have shaken the trap.
34:38We're just going to see if there's anything in it.
34:41If not then we're just going to move this bear back off.
34:44A cub in the trap with a mother hanging around waiting for its cub to come out.
34:50Got a cub inside there I think, Jack.
34:52The boys are going to dart them up.
34:54It takes two guys.
34:56You need to have a guy with a gun just in case.
35:00I got her.
35:06They're just going to check and see if there are any other bears in the vicinity and we'll
35:15chase it off.
35:16It's just right here about 100 feet over the top of the rock in front of me here.
35:20OK, sounds good.
35:21Is she down?
35:22Oh yeah, another call.
35:23Hello, polar bear alert.
35:24Hi, I'd just like to report that there's a bear in the trap.
35:26It's getting closer and closer.
35:40OK, thanks very much.
35:46You're welcome.
35:53I got another bear.
35:54We're going to try to go now.
35:55They're not that far offshore and so we've got a lot of sightings coming this way along
36:00this edge.
36:01So we'll try to turn him around.
36:05And he's kind of making his way along the coastline that way so if we can get him either
36:11going out a little further or back that way is what we're looking to do.
36:15There he is.
36:18All of this is taking place as Churchill's youngsters celebrate Halloween.
36:34A cordon of bear watchers is stationed right around the town.
36:40We were supposed to be here around 4.30 and we'll be here until 9.
36:44Well myself, representing Manitoba Conservation and a group of volunteers, the RCMP and the
36:49ambulance were posted at different spots throughout the town of Churchill.
36:54Happy Halloween.
36:56Assisting in watching for polar bears.
36:59Still at large and moving closer to town this night are the mother and cubs last spotted
37:04at the waste treatment facility.
37:07Making it safe for the children to trick or treat, being that it's Halloween.
37:15Usually there's a lot of snow.
37:17I can remember years ago, like when the kids were smaller, we used to have them bundled
37:21right up in their snow suits and you're trudging through snow like this deep.
37:27But over the years it's really changed a lot.
37:30And it's just getting warmer and warmer every year.
37:32It shouldn't be like this.
37:34It should be snowing out there.
37:37Out there, the mother and cubs are still searching for food, ever so close to those Halloween celebrations.
37:45They're no problem.
37:46Conservation does a good job keeping them away.
37:50You get in the way of one, then your polar bear meet.
37:54Hey Jasmine.
37:57Hello.
38:00Alright, say happy Halloween.
38:02Happy Halloween.
38:03Happy Halloween.
38:05Tonight, thankfully, there are no bear attacks.
38:08But first thing next morning, the mother and cubs will have to be tranquilised.
38:18One of our crew trucks was out there and happened upon her and darted her and her cubs.
38:26So we're going to go give them a hand to lift them and haul them up.
38:34The drug we use is Telazol.
38:36It's just an immobilization drug.
38:38The bear is still fully conscious.
38:40They know what's going on.
38:41Their eyes are open.
38:42They're unable to move their muscles.
38:44The first thing they lose power over is their back legs.
38:47Front legs will go down next once the head movements stop and go in and handle them.
38:52We mobilise the mother first.
38:54And the cubs will always stick with the mother.
38:57So once the mother goes down, they just basically stay.
39:01You get up here and help us pull that guy.
39:03It takes five strong men to haul the mother out on a sled.
39:08Even then, it's an effort to stand upright.
39:18The mother weighs some 300 kilograms.
39:21And dragging her across freshly formed snow is a major effort.
39:26We decided to dart them because they keep coming back toward the recycling facility.
39:29They've had a taste of the garbage that's inside.
39:32So there's no way to move them off.
39:48The tranquilizer will immobilize this mother for several hours.
39:52More than enough time for the polar bear alert team to safely move her out of town.
40:00Once the tranquilised mother has been moved to the truck,
40:03it's time to collect her two cubs.
40:07Weighing in at only 40 kilograms, each cub can be lifted by one man.
40:19Hauling the two of them out is much lighter and easier.
40:24Hauling the two of them out is much lighter and easier work than hauling their mother.
40:34With climate change robbing this family of hunting seals earlier,
40:38there's a real urgency today to get the bears away from town.
40:42The plan is to release them directly back onto the ice.
40:45Hopefully they stay out there and go hunting seals where they belong.
40:53Music
41:03It is one of the most scenically magnificent places on the planet.
41:07The island group of Svalbard, midway between Europe and the North Pole.
41:14This is also one of the world's major denning areas for polar bears.
41:18Some 3,000 of them live here.
41:21A population, as we're about to witness, that is under serious threat from global warming.
41:26Global warming is affecting the bears because it takes away the most important habitat the bears have,
41:31which is the sea ice.
41:33Obviously, if the sea ice are gone, then they are really struggling.
41:37Watching those changes are the people of Longyearbyen,
41:41the only township in this isolated wilderness.
41:44They're well aware of the dangers that polar bears pose.
41:48Norway is quite liberal with guns.
41:50The police encourage people to be armed.
41:53The question is, what's most dangerous, polar bears or unqualified people with guns?
41:58And that's difficult to answer.
42:00We had a bear last week, which was shot very old, very thin polar bear.
42:06More than 20 years old.
42:08It had no blubber whatsoever left, which indicates it hasn't been eating for a long time.
42:13Starving bears are more dangerous than many other bears because they're more desperate.
42:18On average, we shoot three bears a year.
42:22This is a young female bear who came to the local city dump and would not be chased away.
42:29So that, unfortunately, the police had to shoot her.
42:32Because in a town like Longyearbyen, now we're close to 2,000 people.
42:36There's children. We can't have bears around town.
42:39We try to chase them if we can.
42:42We use helicopters, snowmobiles, boats, whatever, to get them out of town.
42:46If that doesn't work, they're shot.
42:48Since 1971, four people have been killed and another six or seven injured by bears.
42:55One of the people killed was a young girl, and she was killed on a mountain just outside of town here.
43:01She was out for a walk, and she met a bear and wasn't paying much attention.
43:05And the bear killed her.
43:08Polar bears are protected in Svalbard.
43:11But that hasn't stopped local shops selling bear skins, collected by Inuit hunters in neighbouring Greenland.
43:19Studying polar bears in the wild is becoming increasingly popular.
43:23Aurora Expeditions are taking this icebreaker, the Polar Pioneer, into waters north of Svalbard.
43:30I really wanted to see polar bears in the wild.
43:32It's something you couldn't do for too much longer, so I wanted to come now while I still could.
43:38We carry rifles, flare pistols, and we have pen flares.
43:42They're bear scaring devices.
43:44As the expedition leader, the safety of passengers is my primary concern when it comes to polar bear safety.
43:50It's an issue we have to take very seriously.
43:54If we see a bear and we feel it's safe to go ashore, we do so.
43:57It's not so much the bear we can see we worry about, it's more the one we can't see.
44:01So when we're on shore, we have people walking on the perimeters of the group.
44:05If one of you starts wandering off, you'll be the easy prey.
44:10We want to at least know in advance when there are bears on shore,
44:14and so we spend a lot of time on the bridge, which is an elevated platform to view shore with.
44:18Looks like we have our first polar bear spotted, about two o'clock off the ship.
44:22It's quite a distance away.
44:24Then polar bears get shorter seasons where they can hunt,
44:27so more bears will be stranded on land,
44:30and they get shorter periods to accumulate fat, which is important for them.
44:34I can't guesstimate how long it will take before polar bears disappear from the Arctic.
44:39Current knowledge says that at the end of this century we will have very little sea ice left.
44:44There will still be winter ice in the Arctic, but the summer ice is almost gone.
44:53And he came right towards us, which was a thrill,
44:57and he just kept moving right along the foreshore, steadily doing his little dog paddle.
45:03He was quite curious, as we motored along parallel to the beach, so he did the same.
45:10After a couple of hundred yards he got fed up and went back on land.
45:15Apart from polar bears, global warming is affecting other wildlife,
45:19such as walruses and seals, both food sources for the bears.
45:24Kayak commander Al Backer is able to get in very close to them.
45:29The kayaking brings you a little closer. You have small, more intimate groups.
45:32With a zodiac, if you get blown close to a seal, you have to get the engine started up and move away,
45:37so you're limited to a distance there.
45:40When you're paddling, you can approach just by drifting within several meters of the seals.
45:45Without moving, the seals weren't perturbed, and that's a contact that's rare, and it's a nice feeling.
45:50Bearded seals have very long whiskers, and when they dry, they curl up at the tips.
45:55It's really quite neat.
45:58We had just come into anchor and going into the zodiacs to have a look at some walruses
46:03that we had spotted from the bridge.
46:05Just as we were approaching the beach, a big bear came walking along towards the walrus.
46:13We got a bit excited about that, thought we were going to see an interesting encounter between bear and walrus.
46:20Walruses certainly can fend for themselves.
46:22A bear might take a small walrus if it was on its own, certainly,
46:25but the bear would get a nasty injury from the walrus tusks.
46:28There's not a lot of food on shore.
46:30They rarely will get a reindeer, unless the reindeer is sick,
46:33so there's no big food source for them, and so they get pretty hungry.
46:39The bear just sort of walked around, had a sniff, and ended up going past them and lay down.
46:46Walruses may appear harmless, but human fatalities are not uncommon.
46:51There's been numerous walrus attacks in Norway.
46:56They're timid and they're curious.
46:58It's a bad combination.
47:00We give them a wide space in the water.
47:16The Arctic
47:22As serene as the Arctic landscape appears in mid-summer, group leaders remain vigilant.
47:28Polar bears are dangerous.
47:29They're opportunistic, they're hungry because once the pack ice drifts north,
47:33they don't have any real food and they prefer seals,
47:36but essentially they get hungry the longer the summer goes on.
47:40For the eco-tourists on board the Polar Pioneer,
47:43sighting a mother bear and cubs is a very significant experience.
47:48We came round the bend and there was a mother with her two cubs,
47:53and the mother started running with her cubs down the shoreline.
47:56They can run as fast as a horse for a short distance before they overheat.
48:00We'd been told that sometimes when the male bears get hungry,
48:03they'll try to take a cub, and we could see that the mother was looking very worried,
48:08and we then saw them eating some seaweed.
48:11I don't think bears normally eat seaweed.
48:13It's a marine animal.
48:14Wandering around the land here, scavenging for birds' eggs and whatever else,
48:18that's not their natural environment.
48:20Their environment is out at sea on the ice, hunting, taking seals.
48:24They can't do that, so it really is a hard time for them.
48:30Behind us we have the Lillehoe Glacier.
48:33It's about 10, 12 kilometres across.
48:35The worrying thing about the glacier is that we took measurements last year,
48:39and looking at it now, it's receded almost a kilometre in places.
48:46It happens with a lot of the glaciers up here in Spitsbergen.
48:49Unfortunately, we see that in the years we've been here,
48:51that they're disappearing very quickly.
48:53Right across the Arctic, the ice is melting at an unprecedented rate,
48:57leaving the polar bears on very thin ice.
49:02I want to see them survive and prosper and grow in population.
49:08And I'm very afraid of the effect of global warming.
49:12To me, that's a tragedy for mankind.
49:16Whoo!
49:30Unless polar bears are saved in the wild,
49:33the only places they may still be seen alive are in zoos and aquariums.
49:38The future's probably bleak
49:40if you look at a lot of the research that's being done.
49:42We're seeing the population in Western Hudson Bay down 16%
49:45over the last couple of decades.
49:47It was very pleasing to see
49:49that they're thinking of changing the classification of these bears.
49:52We've got five nations which are looking after these bears,
49:55but some of those nations still hunt these bears.
49:57It's not the right message.
50:00Climate change is a difficult issue.
50:02There's an argument amongst science in regard to climate change.
50:05What we've got to be careful about with the bear situation
50:07is that we don't get so tied up with the issue of climate change
50:11that we forget about the bears.
50:14Places like SeaWorld and zoos all over the world,
50:17they may be the last places you see polar bears at all.
50:21And zoos have a very, very important role.
50:24A, they've got to create that awareness,
50:26they've got to create that empathy and that caring for these animals.
50:29If they do, then people are more apt
50:31to want to look after the environment more.
50:34The other role for zoos is with the captain breeding.
50:37We've got to ensure that the places we've got for polar bears,
50:40which isn't a lot,
50:41are places for the most genetically valuable animals.
50:46They do adapt very, very well.
50:48They've adapted from the brown bear, you know, not all that long ago.
50:51So, yes, they do adapt.
50:52You know, what we have here, this water behind me is 16 degrees.
50:56If I take that down to 14 degrees, these bears won't go in the water.
51:00You know, they've almost become Gold Coast bears.
51:05If you look at their coats, their coats are very, very thick.
51:08They're very good.
51:09They go through their mulch exactly as they do in the wild.
51:11So they do adapt.
51:13But the situation is, will there be the food for them if they adapt?
51:16It's all about that other food chain.
51:18Will they displace animals in that adaption?
51:21The research that we have and the information we have,
51:23it doesn't look a good story for polar bears.
51:30Many scientists worldwide are saying that the sea ice
51:33is decreasing at a rate that might cause it to disappear entirely
51:37in the next 50 to 100 years.
51:39If that were to be the case,
51:41it's highly likely that we would also lose polar bears.
51:46The polar bear that you see over here
51:48is really the canary in the mine shaft.
51:51And ultimately, as it faces its demise,
51:54is a major warning sign for mankind that they're probably next.
52:00The behavior of our generation, and maybe one more,
52:04can precondition the sustainability of the Earth for 100 generations.
52:09Because once you start melting those ice sheets,
52:12there are points of no return.
52:34The Earth is melting
52:38The Earth is melting
52:42The Earth is melting
52:46The Earth is melting
52:50The Earth is melting
52:54The Earth is melting
52:58The Earth is melting
53:03The Earth is melting
53:07The Earth is melting
53:11The Earth is melting
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