Trouble in Arctic as polar bears and people face warming world | Global News Avenue

“Can I give you some polar bear advice?” asked Tee, a confident 13-year-old boy we met during a visit to Churchill High School.

“If there was a bear this close to you,” she said, measuring about 30 centimeters away with her hand. “Clench your fist and hit it on the nose.

“The polar bear has a very sensitive nose – it just runs away.”

Tee does not need to test this suggestion. But growing up here — alongside the largest land predators on Earth — means bear safety is part of daily life.

Signs in shops and cafes remind anyone out and about to “beware of bears.” My favorite read is: “If a polar bear attacks, you must fight back. “

Running away from a charging polar bear is dangerous — and perhaps counterintuitive. A bear’s instinct is to chase its prey, and polar bears can run at speeds of up to 25 mph (40 km/h).

Key advice: Stay alert and aware of your surroundings. Don’t walk alone at night.

Churchill is known as the polar bear capital of the world. Every year, Hudson Bay (the western edge where the town is located) melts, forcing bears ashore. As autumn chills, hundreds of bears gather here to wait.

“We have freshwater rivers flowing into the area, as well as cold water from the Arctic,” explains Alyssa McCall of Polar Bears International (PBI). “So the freeze happened here first.

“For polar bears, sea ice is a big dinner plate – it’s an entry point to their main prey, seals. They may be excited about a feast of seal blubber – what they eat on land all summer long and not much.”

There are 20 known subpopulations of polar bears in the Arctic. This is one of the southernmost and best-studied areas.

“They’re the fat, white, fluffy canaries of the coal mine,” Alyssa explains. “In the 1980s, we had about 1,200 polar bears here, but now we’ve lost nearly half.”

Decline This has to do with the amount of time the bay is now ice-free, which will become longer as the climate warms. No sea ice means no frozen seal hunting platforms.

“The bears here now stay on land about a month longer than their grandparents did,” Alyssa explains. “This puts stress on the mother. (With less food) it becomes more difficult to stay pregnant and raise the baby.”

Although their long-term survival hangs in the balance, they attract conservation scientists and thousands of visitors to Churchill every year.

We follow a PBI team as they search for bears in the subarctic tundra just a few miles from town. The group travels in a Tundra Buggy, an off-road bus with huge tires.

After several distant sightings, we had a heartbreaking close encounter. A young bear approached and investigated our slow two-carriage convoy. He turned sideways, sniffed one of the carts, then jumped up and placed two huge paws on the side of the cart.

The bear dropped to the ground nonchalantly, then raised its head and stared at me briefly. It’s so confusing to look at the face of an animal that’s both adorable and potentially deadly.

“You can see it sniffing and even licking vehicles, using all the senses to investigate,” said PBI’s Geoff York, who has worked in the Arctic for more than three decades.

Being here during “bear season” means Jeff and his colleagues can test new technologies to detect bears and protect people. The PBI team is currently fine-tuning a radar system called “bear-dar.”

The experimental setup is a tall antenna with a 360-degree scanning detector mounted on the roof of a cabin in the middle of the tundra near Churchill.

“It has artificial intelligence, so here we can basically teach it what a polar bear is,” Jeff explained. “It works 24/7 and can see at night and in poor visibility conditions.”

Protecting the community is the mission of the Polar Bear Alert Team, highly trained rangers who patrol Churchill every day.

We rode with ranger Ian Van Nest, who was on the lookout for a stubborn bear that he and his colleagues had tried to chase away earlier in the day. “It turned back to Churchill. He seemed to have no interest in leaving.”

For bears that plan to wander into town, the team can use a live trap: a tube-like container filled with seal meat that triggers the door when the bear crawls inside.

“Then we put them in a holding facility,” Ian explains. The bears are held captive for 30 days, a period of time designed to teach the bears that going to town in search of food is a negative thing but does not put the animals’ health at risk.

They are then moved — either on the back of a trailer or occasionally airlifted by helicopter — and released further along the bay, away from people.

Cyril Fredlund, who works at the Churchill New Science Observatory, remembers the last time Churchill was killed by a polar bear in 1983.

“It’s right in town,” he said. “The man was homeless and in an abandoned building at night. There was a little bear there too – it knocked him down with its paws like he was a seal.”

People came to help, but they couldn’t get the bear away from the man, Cyril recalled. “It’s like it’s guarding its food.”

That’s when the Polar Bear Alert Program was established. Since then, no one has been killed by polar bears here.

Cyril is now a technician at the new Churchill Marine Observatory (CMO). One of its responsibilities is to understand exactly how the environment will respond to climate change.

Under its retractable roof are two huge pools with water pumped directly from the Hudson Bay.

“We can conduct various controlled experimental studies to study changes in the Arctic,” said Professor Wang Feiyue.

One effect of less ice in Hudson Bay is a longer operating season for the port, which is currently closed nine months a year. A longer season when the bay thaws out and becomes open water could mean more boats coming in and out of Churchill.

Observatory research is underway to improve the accuracy of sea ice forecasts. The study will also explore the risks associated with expanding the port. One of the first investigations was an experimental oil spill. Scientists plan to release oil into one of the pools, test cleanup techniques and measure how quickly the oil degrades in cold water.

For Churchill Mayor Mike Spence, knowing how to plan for the future, especially when it comes to moving goods in and out of Churchill, is crucial to the town’s future in a warming world.

“We are already thinking about extending the season,” he said, pointing to ports that already cease operations during the winter. “Ten years from now, this place will be buzzing with activity.”

Climate change brings challenges to the polar bear capital of the world, but the mayor is optimistic. “We have a great town,” he said, “a great community. It’s growing during the summer (when people come to the bay to watch beluga whales).”

“We all face the challenge of climate change,” he added. “Does that mean you no longer exist? No — you adapt. You figure out how to take advantage of it.”

While Mike Spence said Churchill’s “future is bright,” it may not be so bright for polar bears.

Tee and her friends looked out at the bay from the windows at the back of the school building. Polar Bear Alert Team vehicles are gathering outside to try to remove the bears from the town.

“If climate change continues,” mused Dee’s classmate Charlie, “polar bears may not come here anymore.”

The teacher stepped closer to make sure someone was there to pick up the kids – to make sure they didn’t walk home alone. It’s all part of daily life in the polar bear capital of the world.