Long Light - Polar Bear

It is interesting that in the land of cold winter darkness it would be the light that everyone mentions as a major element in the landscape. Of course, summer turns the Arctic into the land of the midnight sun but it is the angle of the light that makes it so special.

If the equator receives the sun’s rays most directly, the “top of the world” catches the rays at a very low angle. I have always avoided painting and photographing around midday, not because it is too hot but because the light is harsh with choppy shadows. My favourite time is just after sunrise and just before sunset. Well, if there is sun at all in the Arctic it almost always has the drama of dawn and dusk. This magic illumination lasts for a very few minutes in the tropics but in the polar regions it lasts for hours.

This polar bear is peering and sniffing into the distance from a perch on the pack ice, which is the ice that freezes over the sea each winter. It is the platform and highway for the bear’s best hunting. This is where the seals and their pups are to be found just as the mother bears emerge from their dens with their cubs. Spring breakup is a time of plenty for the growing cubs. This is also when the adults put on fat to see them through the next winter.

Sadly, there is mounting evidence of a tragic link between polar bears and the life giving sun. Global warming is making an earlier and shorter spring break up each year, so the pollution created in Los Angeles and Toronto affects the whole planet eventually. The northern sea ice is melting faster and faster. Once it is dispersed, the seal hunting is all but impossible for the bears. The scientists measuring fat layers on tranquilized bears are noting that many, especially mothers and cubs, are so lean as to weaken them for the coming winter. It is very worrying.

I hope that we humans can take a good, long look at the consequences of the changes we are making to the earth’s atmosphere.