A new campaign plans to relocate polar bears to Antarctica to protect them from the effects of climate change. Based on the rates of ice melt in the North, scientists say most polar bears will be
gone by 2050. The first bears will be
moved on Earth Day, April 22. The relocation will be the initial step in a planned five-year program to migrate 3,000 polar bears from the Northern Arctic to the southern continent of Antarctica. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
plans to rule soon on whether to list polar bears as endangered species; however, it has indicated that relocating polar bears would be much less expensive to taxpayers than listing them under the 1973 act.
posted by commonmedia
on Mar 31, 2008 -
24 comments
The Polar Bears of Spitsbergen is an amazing and gruesome photo gallery posted by a photographer who stumbled across a bear & its cubs at feeding time & spent the next 45 minutes capturing the event.
via
posted by jonson
on May 12, 2007 -
40 comments
Polar bears of Churchill, Manitoba. Wildlife photographer Ken Bereskin has a nice collection of polar bears
frolicking in the snow.
This itchy bear
is so frustrated, he's using the rippled ice of a frozen lake to
scratch himself. If you need a change of temperature, he also has
over 500 images
of wildlife from Uganda and Kenya, including
big
cats (a mother
cuddling
with
her cubs, a cheetah
chomping
down on a gazelle, and a young lioness
shredding
a skeleton to pieces),
great
apes, and
other wildlife (
the
lowly hyena eating the cheetah's leftovers, a black-headed heron
eating
a venomous boomslang snake, and a
scary-looking
vulture taking it all in from above). He also has a
smaller
collection of desert wildlife from the dunes of Etoshia National
Park in Namibia. (His real job is working for Apple, and he has a
Panther blog
that hasn't been updated in eons, but evidently that's not as much fun
as chasing after hungry carnivorous animals in the sweltering heat, or
risking frostbite in the snow).
posted by invisible ink
on May 6, 2004 -
5 comments
Svalbard, the Arctic pearl. It appears
Svalbard has a
tourism industry, a
pretty good FAQ, some
cold weather, but not that cold, since the Gulf Stream
terminates there(scroll down to map).
The Polar bears are being studied for
PCB accumulation, which strikes me as interesting, considering the
location of Svalbard. Granted, it's not out of the way, like
Franz Josef Land, but then they don't have
Restaurant Nansen, do they?
posted by dglynn
on Jan 29, 2002 -
14 comments