A few months later, back in Norway, I heard Rear Admiral Trond Grytting, chief of the regional military crisis headquarters in Bodo, located on the north coast of Norway across from Svalbard, lecture on the High North military situation. He recalled the Cold War days when there were NATO bases in northern Norway, Greenland, and Iceland which faced Soviet bases in the Kola Peninsula. Both sides were ready for an invasion by the other. “This is now history,” he said. “However, it would be naive to rule out the possibility of incidents involving the use of arms and show of power in our region. It is pretty much a fact that enormous amounts of biological and geological resources in combination with unsettled borders are the most likely source for a conflict in any region.”
I am afraid my scientists at Ny Alesund are a little naive to believe that international cooperation is a certainty. This is a difficult region, and old rivalries and competition for resources don’t go away so easily. Tensions elsewhere in the world can echo up here too. When Russia sent troops into Georgia in 2008, worries about conflict in the High North rose rapidly. Norway has to be careful not to annoy its neighbor and other nations that are usually its friends, even though they don’t share Norway’s interpretation of the Paris Treaty. But I don’t feel pessimistic. Leaving Longyearbyen, I had a last drink in that bar. This time there were lots of Russian tourists there, too, and everyone had their glasses raised to a toast of “Russia, Norway—Eternal Friends.” If the alcohol stays cheap enough, Svalbard should do well.
ANIMALS
Chapter Nine
TROUBLE AT THE TOP
Out on the sea ice, polar bears rule and they know it.1 In August 2008, near the islands of King Karl Land in Svalbard, I watched a female bear walk across the sea ice to our 400-foot-long ship and try to climb straight on board. The side of the ship was a little too high for her, so after half an hour of nibbling the ship’s bow and playfully scratching its sides, she tried a different strategy. She lay down on the edge of a nearby ice floe, gave a long yawn, folded her paws under her chin and fell asleep. That is to say, she closed her eyes and looked as though she were asleep, but there was something slightly suspicious about her cocked ears.
Patient “still hunting” at the edge of a floe is the polar bear’s number-one technique for catching seals. A bear may sit or stand like this for an hour or more, utterly still but alert, until the instant a seal surfaces.2 Then comes a flurry of lethal action. Knowing this, I was not much inclined to see if I could climb down onto the ice to take a close-up photograph, beautiful though she was. This was a bear that was truly in her element; hunting a large ship suggests a swagger you won’t see in any other large mammal.
Eventually she grew bored, stood up, and strolled off into the far distance, across a vast patchwork of broken ice floes, some not much bigger than herself. Where there was a small gap, she would spring onto the next floe; where it was larger, she would slide into the water, paddle for a while, then smoothly slither out onto the next floe. Watching her progress, I was reminded of just how strange a creature she is. A polar bear really is a great big land animal that has figured out how to walk on water and travel far out to sea. If the temperature rises just a few degrees and the ice vanishes, then the bear will be helpless. Bears can swim a very long way, perhaps fifty or even a hundred miles if they are truly desperate, but they are not whales.
In the area where I saw that female, polar bears were shot for fun by tourists from passing ships not long ago. But since the 1970s, the Norwegian government has been protecting polar bears with such seriousness that the locals joke that “you are better off shooting a man than a bear: the authorities will investigate you less thoroughly.” These days, only scientists are permitted to go ashore on King Karl Land, so as not to disturb the female bears who come here to build the dens in the snow where they will give birth.
Everywhere in the Arctic the polar bear is protected now. In Alaska, where “sport hunters” used to shoot polar bears from airplanes, the polar bear was listed as a threatened species in May 2008. Russia long ago banned polar bear hunting in its part of the Arctic, but recently added a quota for indigenous peoples to help control poaching. Canada and Greenland also protect bears while granting a small number of hunting licenses to indigenous people. All the circumpolar nations work together under the terms of the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, a remarkable agreement signed in 1973 when the Cold War was still on. Other things being equal, polar bears should be making a continuing comeback across the Arctic as hunting pressure recedes.
There are between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears living in the Arctic now, and in some areas their numbers may well be growing. Sadly there is another pressing danger, which will wipe out any small gains the bears are making. That is, of course, the rapid disappearance of the sea ice. Pictures of an unhappy bear perched on a tiny, melting ice floe floating on a blue sea have become the symbol of an Arctic under threat. The pictures highlight the strange irony that the region’s top predator, a terrifying and powerful hunter, is helpless without the ice. Other iconic animals—including the walrus, the white beluga whale, the narwhal with its extraordinary tusk, and the mighty bowhead whale—also may be at risk, as they all habitually live on, near, or under the ice. Then there are the seals of the Arctic, especially the ringed seal which the bear relies on heavily for its food, and the bearded, spotted, ribbon, harp, and hooded seals. All too have a life connected to the ice.
Polar bears look as if they are land animals that have only recently taken to the sea, because that is exactly what they are. Polar bears are descended from brown bears trapped in the far north when most of North America was covered in ice during the last glacial period. They could no longer find their usual berries, fish, and occasional caribou to eat, and turned to seal, perhaps first scavenging dead seals that were washed up onshore and later hunting newborn pups on the accessible ice close by.
Over time, the bear changed. Compared with its relatives to the south, a polar bear is bigger. At 1,300 pounds for a big adult male, only the giant Kodiak bears compete for the title of the world’s largest land carnivore. And its coat has, of course, turned white. The polar bear’s best-kept secret, though, is that underneath the white fur its skin is black, a secret occasionally revealed in the black scars on animals that have been in a few fights. Having a black skin under a white coat is a clever trick. The white fur reflects back all the light that we and other animals can see so that the bear is well disguised against the ice. Longer-wavelength light, of the kind we can’t see, shines straight through the bear’s fur and is soaked up by its black skin, helping keep it warm. Despite these and other changes, including broad paws to help it swim, bigger and better-insulated feet, and a stronger, more mobile neck, polar bears and grizzly bears remain close relatives. Occasionally they mate in the wild, and grizzly-polar bear hybrids may even be growing more common as polar bears are forced to spend more time on land.
Even with these adaptations, polar bears could not live on the frozen ice, where temperatures may fall to-50°C, without eating the ringed seal’s rich blubber. Ringed seals in turn eat fish from the rich and warm (relatively speaking) waters beneath the ice. The ringed seal is a beautiful creature too. The back of its coat shades from light to dark gray, and it is dappled with circles of silver surrounding a darker center that give it its name. It weighs about 150 pounds fully grown, which is a couple of weeks’ worth of blubber-rich food for a bear. Seals, of course, don’t want to end up as a bear’s lunch. Ever since brown bears began moving onto the ice, bear and seal have been running an evolutionary race, one refining its skills at finding seals to eat and the other at avoiding bears.
On a visit to Greenland, I put myself in the bear’s place, going out to hunt ringed seal with Dines Mikaelsen, an Inuit hunter who lives in Tasiilaq in eastern Greenland. Mikaelsen is a young man with a bright smile and a ready laugh; he can speak several languages and lives in the center of Tasiilaq, his home surrounded by his dog team. I
would not step among these fierce Greenlandic huskies if I were not with him; he can call each one separately by name and tell them what to do, and each obeys. As the top dog, he is careful not to provoke jealousy, and if he gives one dog a hug he goes around and hugs every one. He is proud of his hunting skills and has a big photo of himself with his father when, as a teenager, he shot his first polar bear.
Seals are taken both for food and for their skins, which are made into clothing at a workshop in town. Hunting a ringed seal is not so easy. It was July when we set out amid the floes and occasional icebergs in a small, open white boat. Now and again Mikaelsen would spot a distant seal which would poke its head above the water and quickly disappear; usually it was gone while I was still searching for it with my inexpert gaze. Many cold hours passed before we saw a single seal on a floe in the distance.
Mikaelsen cut the outboard motor after giving it a quick last rev to push the boat toward the seal. We crouched low and kept silent as the white boat drifted slowly toward our quarry. I could see that the seal never rested for long. Even here, in the middle of the ice, it would still raise its head every few minutes and briefly scan the horizon for predators.
Many tens of thousands of years of being hunted by bears have given the ringed seal a conspicuous wariness. In Antarctica, where seals face no predators on top of the ice, I have come right up to an indifferent sleeping Weddell seal. Here in Greenland though, stealth is vital. Our seal had begun looking at the white boat, perhaps wondering if there was something odd about this piece of drifting ice, when Mikaelsen shot it cleanly through the head with a rifle, and it slumped down dead.
We took the seal home, Mikaelsen quietly giving it a pat and saying a word of thanks. The seal replied with a last reflex, urinating into the boat.
A polar bear would have to sneak up much closer than we were to have any chance of catching a seal. That is why “still hunting” next to a seal’s breathing hole in the ice is the best plan. As the summer seas freeze in winter and there are fewer “leads” (patches of open water among the ice) in which to surface, ringed seals use the heavy claws on their front flippers to keep their breathing holes open. This adaptation, which they are the only Arctic mammal to possess, enables them to live even in seas that have totally frozen over.
Each seal usually hedges its bets by keeping open three or four holes, more than 600 feet apart. In early winter, the holes will be hidden beneath a crust of fallen snow. As the snow deepens, seals will build lairs in the snow above their breathing holes so that they can rest and in the spring give birth to their pups.3
A polar bear can sniff out these secret places from a long distance, perhaps a little over half a mile, and will sit or stand alongside one, waiting with total concentration.4 When the seal comes up to breathe at one of its holes, it is sensitive to the slightest tremor in the ice above and will dive immediately if it detects danger. This is the crucial moment. If the seal surfaces at the wrong hole, the bear will strike with great speed, smashing through the snow’s crust, grabbing the seal by the neck, and hauling it out onto the ice.5 It is all over in a second.
The bear quickly strips the seal’s skin away to reveal the great store of blubber. News of the kill instantly spreads: out on the ice, you can track down a still bloody bear, standing over its prey, by the crowd of noisy circling ivory and glaucous gulls that suddenly gather from nowhere to snatch bits of seal.
The polar bear does not find it any easier to hunt ringed seals than we did. Over a year, there are a few times of feasting and many long periods of fasting. In summer especially, when the sea ice has retreated and there are many open leads where seals can surface safely, bears can have a tough time. A bear may kill forty to fifty ringed seals a year. Half of those kills are pups still in their birth lair in spring. Another third of the kills are naive young pups taken in early summer. The rest of the year, the pickings are very thin, and polar bears must depend on the fat that they have built up during the good times.
The ability of the polar bear to withstand long fasts exceeds that of any other mammal. During that six- to eight-week period in spring when food is abundant, polar bears can triple their body mass. At its end, 50 percent of their weight will be fat; after the lean season that will fall to just 10 percent.6
Mother bears with new cubs are especially dependent on that spring feast of ringed seal pups. Once a female becomes pregnant, she will eat as much as she can to pile on fat and then retreat into a den in October and wait out the winter. There she will give birth, usually to twins in December or January, and nurse them there through to late February or even mid-April. By then, each cub will weigh around twenty to thirty pounds, while their mother will be hundreds of pounds lighter after having eaten nothing for four to five months. When she finally emerges she is ravenously hungry and must quickly lead her cubs onto the shore ice where ringed seals pups can be found.
The lives of the polar bear and the ringed seal are thus entwined with one another, and both also depend utterly upon the ice. For the bear, the ice is a platform that allows it to walk on the sea and hunt the seals. For the seal, the ice is a place to rest, hide, and raise young while giving access to the rich waters below.
With the end of the summer ice and open water throughout the Arctic now a real possibility, scientists are trying hard to predict what will happen to the bears, given their dependence on ice. We can start to see answers from the bears that live in Canada’s West Hudson Bay. Here, south of the Arctic circle, the sea ice always melts away in summer and the bears have to spend the middle of the year on land, hungry, waiting until the bay freezes over again and they can get back to hunting seals. The bears gather around the town of Churchill, “the polar bear capital of the world,” which has a tourist industry built around trips to see the bears aboard giant “tundra buggies.”
Steven Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Alaska has spent thirty years studying polar bears around the Arctic, including those in Hudson Bay. “It makes it easier to study the bears, as they are a sort of captive audience onshore rather than being spread out over thousands of square miles of sea ice,” he explained. “There is an easier change in the environment to look at. Here, the ice is simply melting earlier. There are no worries about how much of the remaining ice is multiyear ice, about the quality of the ice, and all those other things that make it much more complex to study bears in the polar basin.”
Through patient study of bears and cubs of all ages, Amstrup and his research student Eric Regehr have shown that for every week earlier that the sea ice breaks up, survival rates decline between 3 and 8 percent, depending on the sex and age of the bear.7 “They are coming ashore a lot earlier, and they are coming ashore at a lighter weight,” says Amstrup. “That means they produce lighter cubs, and lighter cubs apparently don’t survive as well.”
Elsewhere in the Arctic, where the bears don’t spend summer onshore, the research is more difficult, but the bears seem equally threatened. In the Beaufort Sea, for example, Amstrup has found that fewer cubs are surviving their first year of life. “The decline fluctuates with the sea-ice condition. It follows years when ice was away from the shore for an extended period,” he says. “We don’t know why, but it might be that there is a lot more open water up there, and we know that cubs don’t do very well swimming, so they might be more vulnerable to drowning or hypothermia. In recent years, the ice has been much rougher than it used to be, with sharp, angular shards of ice sticking up in all directions. That might make it more difficult for those tiny cubs as they try to follow their mother who needs to feed.”
In 2008, the USGS pulled together computer models of the future state of the ice, the kind of models that we have seen already, with what was known about the life of bears. The goal was to predict the future of polar bears across the whole of the Arctic.8 There was no good news; only the grim conclusion that two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population would be lost by 2050. But that was enough for immediate political action. I
n the United States the polar bear was quickly given extra protection as a “threatened” species.
Reading the USGS’s gloomy forecasts, I could not help wondering what would happen to that confident female bear that I had seen in Svalbard, strolling across the ice to hunt a ship. Her part of the Arctic fell into the worst category in the USGS report: “extirpation by 2050.” That means her grandcubs may be the last polar bears to live there.
Bears will be worst hit where the sea ice shrinks so far away from the shore that they cannot reach the ice to hunt without an exhausting swim, or cannot make it back to the shore when it is time to dig a birthing den in the snow. Polar bears are powerful swimmers, but the water is not their real home and the farther the ice retreats from the shore, the greater the risk that polar bears will drown. In a single day in August 2008, scientists in a plane spotted nine bears swimming far out in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. The ice edge had melted away far to the north, and one of the bears was already more than sixty miles from the shore. As the seas widen, not only do the distances that bears have to swim increase but so do the size of the waves, increasing the risk of exhaustion and drowning.
Polar bears will have a better chance in parts of the Arctic where summer ice may hang on longer. Along the coast of the Canadian islands and around to Greenland, where the ice circling in the Beaufort Gyre tends to pile up against the shores, the USGS prognosis for bears gives them an extra thirty years, with “extirpation by 2080” expected. Only in one region, in the narrow, frozen channels among the northerly Canadian islands, might the bears survive until the end of the century.
After the Ice Page 15