Some welcome good news: researchers in Britain and Minnesota have used satellite images to discover that populations of emperor penguins are twice that previously thought, with not only the numbers doubling from around 300,000 to almost 600,000 but the discovery of seven previously unknown colonies.

Using a technique known as pan-sharpening to increase the resolution of the satellite imagery, the science teams were able to differentiate between birds, ice, shadow and penguin poo (guano).

They then used ground counts and aerial photography to calibrate the analysis. These birds breed in areas that are very difficult to study because they are remote and often inaccessible with temperatures as low as -58°F (-50°C).

Lead author and geographer Peter Fretwell at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which is funded by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council, said the research findings are groundbreaking.

“We are delighted to be able to locate and identify such a large number of emperor penguins,” Fretwell said. “We counted 595,000 birds, which is almost double the previous estimates of 270,000 to 350,000 birds. This is the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space.”

On the ice, emperor penguins with their black and white plumage stand out against the snow and colonies are clearly visible on satellite imagery. This allowed the team to analyze 44 emperor penguin colonies around the coast of Antarctica, with seven previously unknown.

“The methods we used are an enormous step forward in Antarctic ecology because we can conduct research safely and efficiently with little environmental impact, and determine estimates of an entire penguin population,” said co-author Michelle LaRue from the University of Minnesota Polar Geospatial Center, which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and is part of the university’s College of Science and Engineering.

“The implications of this study are far-reaching,” LaRue added. “We now have a cost-effective way to apply our methods to other poorly-understood species in the Antarctic, to strengthen on-going field research, and to provide accurate information for international conservation efforts.”

About the animal, LaRue adds,

“They exude their name,” she said. “They’re a very stately and calm animal.”

When she and other scientists visited Antarctica to see emperor penguins in person, she said the birds were gentle and curious, exploring humans who were careful not to make any sudden moves on the ice.

“They’re just really cool creatures,” LaRue said. “They’ll get one to two feet away and just kind of check you out. They’re not aggressive at all.”

A photo slideshow is here.

A BBC reporter travels to Antarctica, extolling the penguins’ photogenic qualities while soberly bringing to awareness that these species are today’s “canary” for global climate change, due to their sensitivity to changes in their environment.  Explains researcher Ron Naveen of Oceanities,

“Penguins are sending us messages that we need to be listening to. Whatever responses the penguins are showing in the polar latitudes, at some point the great warming will hit the rest of us living in the more temperate latitudes …  it will give us a clue as to what’s going to happen to us maybe decades from now, maybe centuries from now.”

A visit to Antarctic is a starkly beautiful and surreal visual feast, not to mention a testimonial to nature’s power.  Take a 3 minute vacation with a group of travelers who managed to capture the rapid implosion of an iceberg. Hint:  you will want to turn down your computer’s volume!

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Listen to the story or read the transcript.

But what is the long-term future for the polar bear?  Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin ponders,

Zoos have been very important in conserving imperiled species, such as the California condor, the Mexican wolf and even the American bison. But one of the really hard questions about polar bears is if we take them into captivity and through climate change the sea ice disappears, what are we saving them for if ultimately we destroy their habitat and they can’t return to the wild?

In the conservation world, the future is fraught with troubling uncertainty. For now, however, we can see the bears in their natural habitat. Dr. Jeffrey Bonner, CEO of the St. Louis Zoo, describes bears at Churchill in a “walking hibernation,” waiting for the ice to freeze for the winter. TravelWild Expeditions can take you to see these top predators in their natural habitat.  Check out our polar bear tours to Churchill, Manitoba and call today to reserve your spot for departures this fall.

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Says Derocher in his author bio:

There’s no doubt that I’m a polar bearaholic but then most people are fascinated by this species. I’ve yet to hear a person say “I don’t like polar bears.” Far from it. People are intrigued by the ice bear for reasons I’ve grappled with for years. As I outline in this book, I think it’s tied to their massive size, remoteness, and their dazzling fur. Any animal that makes a living in such a harsh environment is interesting but being drop-dead gorgeous and potentially deadly seems to spark our interest. Many cultures have deep ties with bears and this likely stems from the fact that humans often compete directly with bears for food and habitat. Dealing with bears is probably coded in our DNA.

There’s no question that a warming planet threatens polar bears and the ecosystem they depend on but this book is more a celebration of polar bears than a requiem. Ultimately, I was convinced to write this book because I feel that we only care about things we know about, so hopefully this book will engage readers and more people will commit to ensuring the polar bear has a future.

In a review of this coffee table-style book, Canadian journalist Ed Struzik entices,

Tracing the origins of the animal from its genetic roots in the Irish brown bear, Derocher takes us on an evolutionary journey that explains why an adult polar bear’s skin is black when it is pink at birth, why the bears eschew meat in favour of fat and why they’re considered marine mammals instead of terrestrial ones.

BBC’s Frozen Planet has finally begun its much anticipated premier in the US, on the Discovery Channel, Sundays at 8 PM. All over the internet reviewers are marveling at the series. This Sunday features the second in the seven-part series and several journalists have documented the arduous videography.

In gathering footage from locations where temperatures can hover around 60 degrees below zero (let’s not forget those hurricane force winds), the crew took great precautions.

[Producer Vanessa] Berlowitz took the crew, many of whom she had worked with on Planet Earth, to the Norwegian wilderness for a two-week training period before leaving for the Arctic. With 24-hour darkness and temperatures hovering at minus 13 degrees, they engaged in such activities as “advanced snowmobile driving at night, in blizzards,” and simulating snowmobile crashes, since outside help wouldn’t arrive for days if they experienced any actual emergencies during filming.

The crew also took up rifle training—“in the dark, with a blizzard”—to protect themselves from polar bear attacks, as well as crevice and avalanche rescue procedures.

The bitter climate required wearing up to 10 layers at once, so wardrobe included everything from fine, thin silk thermals, to wools and fleeces of varying thicknesses, to the heaviest possible, industrial strength goose down.

Even with all these precautions, [a] polar bear incident was not the crew’s only close call. Flying low over the Greenland ice sheet to get a dramatic shot of waterfalls and glaciers, Berlowitz sensed her helicopter being pulled downward, then starting to spin.

“There was a massive downdraft sucking us down,” she says. “It was like looking into hell’s mouth, because all I could see was this abyss—this kind of vertical black hole with water plummeting down—and I felt like that was my moment of reckoning. It was a strange feeling, because I thought, very simply, ‘This is it. The end.’ There was no panic. Just a feeling that we’d overstepped it.”

The crew used husky dogs, both for transporting gear and protection.

You’d think polar bears—at up to 8.2 feet in length and weighing up to 1,800 pounds, the world’s largest land carnivores—wouldn’t be afraid of anything. Not so apparently.
The team who created Frozen Planet—the upcoming Discovery Channel/BBC series from the makers of Planet Earth—learned that if one is to travel through polar bear territory, it’s best to bring along dogs. Lots of dogs.

To film several of the Arctic scenes from the series, Frozen Planet filmmakers worked alongside 38 native sled dogs. The dogs (huskies) became trusted companions, helping the film crew transport gear through some of the planet’s most inhospitable locales, as well as providing round-the-clock protection against polar bear attacks.

“Inuit have long known that polar bears and dogs do not get on, and utilize their huskies as polar bear deterrents,” said Vanessa Berlowitz, series producer for Frozen Planet.

“I watched an unbelievable encounter where a polar bear went up on his back legs and looked like he was going to pounce on (one of the sled dogs) Bollom,” recalled Berlowitz. “Bollom then got on HIS back legs, barked right in the polar bear’s face, and the bear cowered and ran away!”

The huskies impressed the entire film crew. Said Berlowitz, “Huskies are really tough; they will sleep outdoors even in the coldest Inuit settlements because they overheat inside. They have some of the thickest fur of any mammal and can withstand really low temperatures.”

———–

If Frozen Planet piques your interest, stay tuned for a new Imax film, scheduled for release in mid-April. To the Arctic offers beautiful videography and more polar seduction.

If you’re more than an armchair traveler, contact TravelWild today to grab one of the last spots on this summer’s expedition to Spitsbergen with Wayne Lynch, birding expert Chris Leahy, expedition leader Dennis Mense, and bear biologist Gary Alt.  Bon Voyage!

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While there may be 50+ words to describe snow in Arctic nations, there are at least a few phrases to describe February 29: Leap Day, Bachelor’s Day and now, the Day of Cold.  Russian Arctic dwellers celebrate the  Day of Cold as a reminder that it’s not just polar bears that are threatened by climate change, but people are also dependent on the polar ice.

The languages of the Arctic nations have about 50 words to describe different types of snow. Since their childhood these people learn to distinguish between slightest details, shades and different types of snow. The cold weather is a prerequisite of the whole Arctic environment. Without it polar bears, seals, white whales and other Arctic sea mammals could not survive. The traditional way of living of the Arctic people would also be impossible without the cold weather.

The idea to celebrate the Day of the Cold emerged in a reindeer skin tent, a traditional house of the Arctic people, in a village located in the vicinity of the city of Naryan Mar in Russia’s polar region, head of the Center of Arctic Initiatives Matvey Chuprov says.

“We got together and decided that we needed a common public holiday which would unite peoples of the Arctic region and help them protect their interests, the environment we live in. We decided that it was time to stop fighting global warming and start “protecting” the cold instead.

Protecting something you cherish versus fighting its threats is a strategy that usually yields better success.

And the Global Seed Vault celebrates its accomplishments as it passes its fourth anniversary. A journalist with the Atlantic interviewed Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, tasked with maintaining the vault in collaboration with the Norwegian government.

Today’s fourth anniversary will bring several new seed shipments to the vault, including an ancient grain called amaranth, a favorite of the Aztecs and Incas, and a malting barley from the Pacific Northwest called “Klages,” which is used in many craft beers.

I talked to Cary about the vault’s anniversary, its importance, and the future of agriculture.

When I think about the seed vault, the first thing that stands out to me is that it’s really a technology of deep time, a way of coping with the kinds of events that happen on very broad time scales. Do you see any other technologies or institutions outside the world of agriculture as playing a similar role as yours?

Fowler: I haven’t given it a lot of thought, so I guess I would say no. We tried to design this facility to last as far as we could see into the future. We didn’t actually plan this to be what some in the media have called it, which is a doomsday vault. We’re not people who run around with signs saying “repent the end is near.” In fact we realized that unfortunately the vault was probably going to be used sooner rather than later. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, there was a fire in the national gene bank in the Philippines and two years before that they experienced a flood, so you don’t have to have some kind of global catastrophe for this thing to be useful. We’re losing biodiversity right now, and it isn’t necessarily because of some global catastrophe.

But of course I have to acknowledge that even though we weren’t planning for doomsday, the facility is such that it would provide a lot of protection for many large catastrophes depending on where they occurred, but that wasn’t the original impetus for the project.

I know that you have some interesting seed shipments coming in association with the anniversary. Are you particularly excited about any of them?

Fowler: Two of them, actually. There is a very important, very historic dwarfing wheat variety coming from the United States. The short stature of modern varieties of wheat is very important, because it allows the wheat to carry more grain on the top without falling over. That’s a huge event in agricultural history that we’ll be able to preserve.

The other one we haven’t publicized too much, because we didn’t want to draw too much attention to what is a very sensitive situation—we’re getting a large shipment in from ICARDA, an international agricultural research center in Syria. It’s not a Syrian government organization, it’s an international center and it’s completely independent from the government. Obviously, there are a lot of troubles in that country right now and that center, ICARDA, has been safety duplicating its material all along, as a good professional team will do, but the fact that this shipment is coming up right now in some ways points to the utility and value of the seed vault. One would not expect a seed bank, even in Syria, to be a target, but unfortunately there is a recent precedent: seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed or severely damaged over the course of the wars there, not because they were blown up or anything but because in the context of chaos and the breakdown of law and order, people have come in and looted them. So we’re pretty happy to have that collection at the vault.

We are fortunate to learn so much about the Arctic through access to news, research, books and video. The first installment of David Attenborough’s acclaimed Frozen Planet airs in the US on the Discovery Channel March 19^th.  Be inspired by this changing corner of our planet and join TravelWild on a tour—to see firsthand the polar bears of Spitsbergen or Churchill or to explore the Arctic waters.

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As planned, lake water under pressure rushed up the bore hole 100-130 feet pushing drilling fluid up and away from the pristine water, Mr. Yelagin said, and forming a frozen plug that will prevent contamination.
There have been much-disputed hints that life might still exist there. If so, that would give a great boost to hopes of finding life in similar conditions in icy water on one of the moons of Jupiter.

And from the AP

Lake Vostok could hold living organisms that have been locked in icy darkness for some 20 million years, as well as clues to the search for life elsewhere in the solar system.
The effort has drawn fears that the more than 60 tons of lubricants and antifreeze used in the drilling may contaminate the lake’s pristine waters. Bell said the Russian team was doing its best “to do it right” and avoid contamination, but others were nervous.

“Lake Vostok is the crown jewel of lakes there,” said University of Colorado geological sciences professor James White. “These are the last frontiers on the planet we are exploring. We really ought to be very careful.”

Lukin said Russia had waited several years for international approval of its drilling technology before proceeding. He said that, as anticipated, lake water under pressure rushed up the bore hole, pushing the drilling fluid up and away, then froze, forming a protective plug that will prevent contamination of the lake.

Russian scientists will remove the frozen sample for analysis in December when the next Antarctic summer season comes. They reached the lake just before they had to leave at the end of the Antarctic summer, when plunging temperatures halt all travel to the region.

Each year the effort has been a race against time, as scientists are forced to evacuate the project each February as the austral winter envelopes the Antarctic continent, rendering working conditions impossible. Vostok is the coldest point on the planet, registering -127 degrees Fahrenheit this week, and at an elevation of 11,000 feet, oxygen supplies are thin. Indeed, the station is at the Pole of Cold, where the lowest air temperature has been recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. Last year’s effort stopped just 96 feet short of reaching the lake.

The project has been controversial among scientists and environmentalists, due to the risk of contamination. Next Antarctic season – in October 2012, the scientific team will return, hoping to send down a robot to take samples of the water and sediment floor. Approval is still pending from the Antarctic Treaty organization. Scientists hope information gleaned from Lake Vostok and other subglacial lakes will contribute to our understanding of climate change, life on other planets, and other scientific inquiries.

“In the simplest sense, it can transform the way we think about life,” NASA’s chief scientist Waleed Abdalati told The Associated Press in an email Wednesday.

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