Tony and I recently watched the BBC Frozen Planet series, and one of the things that struck us was how hard life is for polar bears. They endure unimaginably harsh conditions in the Arctic, particularly during winter, and during summer they struggle increasingly to find food as more and more of the sea ice melts. There are magnificent polar bear photographs in Paul Nicklen’s book Polar Obsession.
A beautiful and fascinating interactive web application called State of the Polar Bear was created for the Polar Bear Specialist Group, showing the range, size and divisions of the polar bear populations in the Arctic. I enjoyed looking at the globe from this particular angle – you’re viewing the South Pole surrounded by Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. Experiment with clicking on the different information boxes that pop up – you can dig quite deeply into the data.
Via FlowingData.
