Thin Ice Blog  

WWF's work in the Arctic, around the pole.

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This amazing part of Manitoba

Our day starts early at Cape Churchill following a long day of travel and a late night getting the camp up and running. The temperature has dropped dramatically in the last few days and is now around -27 C with winds gusting up to 60 km/hr. This adds a wind chill factor of nearly -48 C (at -40, centigrade and Fahrenheit are the same). BJ Kirschhoffer, Director of Field Operations for PBI, and I still have a few things to take care of regarding the remote communications system at the Cape. If everything works as planned this morning, I have an 8 AM interview with Norwegian Public Radio. We head out in the dark on our Tundra Buggy to the Cape Tower, an old observation platform originally set up by Dr. Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service. BJ needs to connect a new battery pack to the repeater system and we’ll also deploy a small generator for recharging the system during the week.

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Heading for Cape Churchill

Wagons ho! It’s moving day and the morning starts a good hour earlier. By 7 AM we are fed and aboard our tour buggies. It’s still dark as we head out on the tundra hoping for that perfect sunrise bear. And as luck would have it – we find him …

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What a day!

It’s the first day out for our new group and I am amazed and happy to look out on the Bay at first light – ice is forming well out onto the tidal flats! This is a stark change from just five days ago when we flew over this same area during our coastal survey and saw only open water. The Wildlife Management Area just east of Churchill is unique and protected for this very reason – ice forms and is retained along this part of the coast early in the winter and remains late in the spring. This is also why so many polar bears remain, or migrate into this area in the late autumn as they await their opportunity to return to the sea ice.

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Venturing into Wapusk National Park

Today I’m joining a special group of visitors from Germany led by a colleague from their WWF home office. WWF Germany, in partnership with Wick’s (the company many of us know as Vick’s), has become a funding partner of the WWF Global Arctic Program and our polar bear conservation efforts. We are all very lucky to be joining Frontiers North Adventures for their final trip of 2010, and the only trip that is permitted into Wapusk National Park and all the way to Cape Churchill.

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Documenting Inuit elder perspectives on climate change

This year I had a unique opportunity while in town. PBI and Frontiers North Adventures premiered a new film by Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro. The documentary was filmed in Inuktitut with English subtitles and is called Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. Some of you may recognize Zach from his last award winning project, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner). This new work is a documentary recording Inuit elder perspectives on climate change across the Nunavut region of the Canadian high arctic. Along with the discussions on observed changes witnessed by elders and their concerns about the future, the film highlights some fairly direct and sometimes angry views around polar bears, conservation efforts, and the scientists who study this animal.

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Making connections on the tundra

My first week in the town of Churchill is focused around meetings with partners and scientists, so this is very much a working trip for me. Many of you may ask, why Churchill? WWF has long supported polar bear research efforts in the Hudson Bay region going back to the early 1970’s. We continue that direct support today, helping to maintain one of the best long term research and monitoring efforts on polar bears anywhere in the world. You can see tangible results of the current support via our online Polar Bear Tracker. This long term research has provided some of the clearest links between changes in polar bear population dynamics directly tied to changes in climate and sea ice.

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‘Avoid changes that are unmanageable, and manage changes that are unavoidable’

It’s November 10th in Churchill, Manitoba, and something is not quite right. The air temperature is well above freezing on our arrival and there are only small remnants of a past snow across the mostly bare and brown tundra. There is no ice on Hudson Bay and little sign of any forming far to the north in Foxe Basin. This is disturbing to us, and even more disturbing to the local polar bears.

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