Tag: polar bear

PITSBERGEN, Norway -- The polar bear is 3 years old and hungry. Ursus maritimus has spent two years with his mother, and now on his own, he prowls the shoreline of an Arctic island, his fur the yellow-white of summer. He is vulnerable to the appetites of older and larger bears; this first year on his own may be the most treacherous in his life.

We watch from our ship's deck as he strides, his huge front paws landing surely on shoreline scree. He's not 100 yards off the bow of the National Geographic Endeavour, where our cameras are clicking so furiously it sounds like cicadas on a summer's night.

It is a summer's night, but at 79 degrees North latitude, the season is rendered in pewter, silver, gray and white, edged with shocking turquoise from light bouncing among compressed ice crystals in glaciers and floating bergs.

As our ship pushes through pack ice into a white wilderness, we enter a land where glaciers have retreated but never disappeared. We are looking at the planet as it was 10,000 years ago, gouged and worn by the great moving rivers of ice. We'll spend a week exploring the High Arctic around the archipelago of Svalbard, where Spitsbergen is located, then sail for another week through the spectacular Norwegian fjords that were carved, polished and abandoned by that same ice.