Polar bear population shrinks as climate concerns grow

Researchers have been looking at this population for a long time and we're starting to see trends relating to climate change in these bears. These bears are also some of the most southerly bears on the planet and so you would expect if there's going to be changes from climate that we would see them here first. Churchill is considered the polar bear capital of the world, not so much because of how many bears are here but because this is where people can actually go and see them and appreciate what a polar bear is and the threats that they currently face. Polar bears need sea ice in order to find their main prey source, seals, so they need that platform in order to catch the seals. The sea ice here is gradually breaking up sooner in the springtime or summertime and coming back later in the fall and that means that polar bears are spending more time on land where they don't have anything to eat and less time out on the ice where they can catch the seals that are their preferred prey. Polar bears are large animals, they have a lot of energy within their body when they're adults and they can survive some pretty tough times but the cubs, they're a different thing and they don't have that energy and if the female doesn't have enough energy to give them the milk that they need during their first year of life then they aren't going to make it. You can think of the polar bear den as almost like an extension of the womb. That time is so critical, the baby bear is so small and so vulnerable it can't survive outside of that snow structure. The synthetic aperture radar work that PBI is doing is designed to help us locate polar bear dens under the snow so that we can protect them from disturbances whether those disturbances be oil and gas activities or other human activities. It's a tool that attaches to aircraft and it's a small little antenna that sits on the outside and you fly it over the landscape and you can almost think about like mowing the lawn. You can make these large transects back and forth. It can be a massive tool so we could cover large areas of the Arctic and if we can prove that this tool works we can hone in on these spots and potentially pinpoint where these dens are underneath the snow. If we keep putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the Arctic will continue to warm and we will continue to see less and less sea ice. When you look at the long-term trend it's not good for polar bears. If we fail to act and just let polar bears disappear that would be a real travesty. But even more important than that is everything is connected. What's happening to polar bears now is coming to all of us who live at places far from where the polar bears live.