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Global Warming: Melting kingdom of the Polar Bear

By Ashok K Vaish; Photographs by Ashok K Vaish and his co-expeditionists Larry Porter and Darrell Gulin

Through the long and dark Arctic winter, the mother Polar Bear sat quietly in her den. She had given birth to her cubs, and was waiting for them to grow strong enough to follow her out to the ice pack. The ice pack is her refrigerator, the place where she gets her food. It’s quite literally a floating, rotating gyre or “cap” of ice that covers the Earth’s northern pole. Along its edges of cracked and broken ice swims the Polar Bear's food: ringed seals, bearded seals, harp and hooded seals and, occasionally, carcasses of beached beluga whales, walruses, narwhals, and bowhead whales.

After months of waiting in her den with her cubs, the mother Polar Bear comes out weak and starving. She can almost smell her next meal: fresh seals swimming in the water on the edge of the ice cap.

When she ambles out, followed by her two cubs, she’s looking much thinner than she did a few months ago. There is not a moment to lose. She needs to pack in as much energy as she possibly can. She'll need to swim with her cubs to edge of the ice cap, and hunt for seal pups and other animals that are swimming near the edge. She is a good swimmer, but a hungry and weak Polar Bear can only swim so far.

She reaches the edge of the land, and jumps right in, and swims several miles to reach the ice pack. There she noses around near the edge of the broken drift ice, looking into the waters for a seal to catch. She finally senses a ripple in the water. In a flash, she strikes out with her giant paws, and the next moment a struggling seal is trapped in her mouth. She drags the seal away from the edge and quickly devours the much needed fat that her body needs to fight the Arctic cold.

This is her life pretty much throughout the year. Polar bears hunt all year. But springtime is the best for them as the seals have just pupped in large numbers. The bears are nomads, that is to say, they move around from place to place in search of food. They can stay on the drift ice all year and hunt all year. They sleep on the drift ice at any time of the day that they wish as they have no predators (that's right, no one to hunt them down, except humans who kill them for their fur.) They only have to come to land to have babies, which the mother does every two or three years.

The Arctic Polar Bear’s story is a sad sign of global warming. We bring you a first person account by scientist-engineer turned amateur documentary filmmaker Ashok K Vaish who sailed through the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean on a special expedition, and brought back images and tales of an Earth in danger of meltdown.

Last year I saw the effects of global warming first hand when I traveled to the arctic region near the North Pole. We were in an ice-breaker near the island of Spitsbergen in Norway close to the polar ice cap (about 81 degrees North, latitude). We had gone there to take photographs of wild life - the polar bears, walruses, seals and birds that make this stark but fragile landscape their home.