Polar Bear: One Mother's Year on the Melting Ice

The ice is breaking apart. A mother polar bear and her two cubs have one Arctic year to survive it. Follow a polar bear mother through a full year around Svalbard, the islands halfway between Norway and the North Pole: the snow den of the polar night, the first steps into spring light, seal hunts on the sea ice, the summer melt and a long swim, the hungry autumn on shore while the bears wait for ice, and the return of the frozen sea. About the characters: Isa (the mother), her two cubs, Ridge (the big male) and the arctic fox are composite characters, named for storytelling and built from what biologists have recorded across many polar bears. They are not single tracked animals. The behavior, numbers and places come from field research. CHAPTERS 0:00 One Mother, One Arctic Year 0:51 Chapter 1 - Polar Night: The Snow Den 6:25 Chapter 2 - Spring: Into the Light 11:52 Chapter 3 - Late Spring: Kingdom of Ice 18:11 Chapter 4 - Summer: The Great Melt 24:56 Chapter 5 - Autumn: Waiting for Ice 30:30 Chapter 6 - Early Winter: The Ice Returns 35:43 Credits WHAT YOU WILL SEE How polar bears den and raise cubs, why their fur looks white, how they hunt ringed seals at breathing holes and lairs, the arctic fox that follows them, spring mating fights, the shrinking sea-ice season, long-distance swimming, egg raids on bird islands, walrus herds, autumn sparring and fasting on land, and the 1973 agreement that brought Svalbard's bears back. MAIN SOURCES FOR THE FACTS Norwegian Polar Institute (npolar.no) and Polar Research: Svalbard denning, Barents Sea population, hunting history Polar Bears International and the Polar Bear Agreement (polarbearagreement.org): biology, reproduction, population Pagano et al. 2018, Science (energy use of Beaufort Sea bears) and Pagano et al. 2024, Nature Communications (Hudson Bay bears on land) Stern & Laidre 2016, The Cryosphere (sea-ice loss in all 19 polar bear regions) Durner et al. 2011, Polar Biology (long-distance swimming); Archer et al. 2024, Journal of Mammalogy (den emergence) Derocher & Wiig 1999; Derocher et al. 2011, MEPS (Hopen dens and late ice); Laidre et al. 2022, Science (Southeast Greenland bears) IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group; NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice News ABOUT THE FOOTAGE All video is real wildlife footage: licensed stock (Artgrid/Artlist), Creative Commons (CC BY) videos and free-license Mixkit clips. Shots filmed in Svalbard are used on every line that names Svalbard. Some shots come from Greenland, Canada or other Arctic coasts and are used only on lines that do not name a place. Some scenes of the story (the den emergence, the carcass fight) are shown with stand-in footage of other polar bears and Arctic places. AI DISCLOSURE The narration is an AI-generated voice (no real person's voice is imitated). The music is original. No AI-generated video. FOOTAGE CREDITS Footage: Artgrid/Artlist (licensed); Mixkit (free license); CC BY videos by Adrian Parsons; Andrea Di Stefano; Bart Post; CF.Photography; LocoMoPics; Pancrazio Auteri; Pascal Vagner (full list with links in the pinned comment). Music: original music. Narration: AI-generated voice. Subscribe for the next wildlife documentary from the wild places of the North. #polarbear #svalbard #wildlifedocumentary