Just on the edge of the western Gulf of Hudson lies a small town of Churchill, Manitoba.
Here the sea occurs with the forest forest under the pulsation of the northern lights. Next north trees stop growing. The snow covers the harsh landscape of the Canadian shield, and the continuous wind cut through the willows.
No roads lead to Churchill. Just the railway line and the take -off -postcard of the airport, which carries random charter planes.
But it attracts tourists and scientists, because in a short time the Kings Arctic migrate through the city back into their homes on frozen sea ice. Travelers come here from all over the world, looking for one thing: to close their eyes with white bears.
Bear
White bears of meatolism through Churchill every fall when they wait for the ice in the bay. At first the men go out on the ice, wandering and experiencing the edges, trying to travel north, where they can finally hunt a ring – their main power source.
Scientists agree on Churchill because this is the most affordable moment to study white bears. The bears here are the most investigated in the world and the most photographed.
These Arctic beasts have great faces: they play and hug and tremble to go through time. Males will often be spars, trying to get acquainted so that they are prepared for the accused battles in the spring, during the mating season.
The cubs remain next to their mothers for two or three years before they are being driven and forced to live on their own. Over the next year, they experience water – sometimes struggling to survive when they learn to hunt and maintain themselves in the tundra.
“A sharp change in the ecosystem”
However, in recent years the warming of the Arctic melts its place of residence on the ice, changing the behavior of bears: scientists from Polar Bears International say the ice is formed two weeks later than it was in the 1980s, and retreating two weeks earlier.
This monthly change in their environment makes the bears continue the shore longer, closer to people and away from seals in the north.
This change is caused by climate change – which their parents and grandparents should not face. Yes, bears have been constantly developing, since they diverged from Grizzi about 500,000 years ago, but the rate of change is anxious scientists.
The main climate -the scientist on the international flavio lehner Polar Bears says that from the decline of the sea ice of the polar bear population in the western Hudson, it reaches 618, about half of what used to be in the 1980s.
“It's pretty deep,” he says. “It is difficult to find other places, in addition, which were knocked out in the Amazon, where you see such sharp changes in the ecosystem caused by climate change.”
Lener does not suggest that the situation will improve, and it also sees a shift of behavior outside the population. Previously, it was much more characteristic of the search for mothers with Triplets, who, according to personal experience, are rare now.
Scientists with Polar Beas International note that these bears can only be comfortable maintaining their land for 180 days. In other parts of the world, the bears were spotted by hunting birds and deer, but scientists say that this diet with high protein content can damage their kidneys and do not prevent them from losing 2-4 pounds a day when they leave the ice.
“The current pace of change works too fast,” explained John Whitman, Chief Scientist PBI. “The polar bears will not be able to develop or acclimatize in time in order to fight our current sea ice loss speed.”
Whiteman expects the white bears to follow the next 10 years in Churchill, but the term begins to receive fuzzy from 20 to 30 years.
“We eventually know when we lose sea ice, we lose white bears,” Witman said.
Town
Churchill was always a city in the abyss. He lived a lot of lives – from home to the first nations to the trade position in the military city so far, the capital of the white bear world.
This attracts a special type of person. Often the one that finds pleasure in solitude. People who come to work are a semi-nomadic worker of the tourist industry, and maybe looking for changes. They are guides and nature lovers, seasonal workers attracted to this slow, simpler life.
Others – like the mayor of the city for 30 years, Mike Spence – spent their lives here. When he was a child, security officers fired from 20 to 22 bears a year. But over time, the approach has changed.
“First of all, we respect the wild,” he says. “The polar bears are quite important in the world of indigenous people at the top of their food chain. There is a lot of respect.”
Now the city is confronted with the future where the tourist season of the polar bear can potentially disappear. At this time, the community will be forced to coexist more closely when they expect the ice to form in the bay. And as the infrastructure is too struggling to adapt to the warming climate and melting eternal permafrost, Spence is one of many people looking for solutions.
“We have always been challenged,” Spence says. But the community also “usually finds a way”.
These solutions include a port and a railway line that collapsed in 2017 because of the flood combination and lack of maintenance. Once it starts working in full, I hope it will welcome more consistent jobs and resources for society. Meanwhile, the new program in the city is growing micrograpins, and new white bearings for garbage are placed on the streets, and everything is to create a steady way forward in the north for humans and wildlife.
“What we need to do now is to create on our young people who grow up here, so they play a greater role in creating a stronger community and a greater community,” Spence says. “They see themselves what they have is quite valuable.”
Fighting for the future
On the outskirts of the city, Vayat Dale connects dogs with sleds, preparing to head the first of three rounds a day. Falling is a peak of the tourist season, and it will spend the day among the trees of the boreial forest, sliding in the snow.
Churchill relies on tourism that comes from those who want to see white bears. In order to support your business, some travel companies seek to protect their future.
One of these ways is to advertise other aspects of this wild north – Aurora, which dances overhead 300 nights of the year and the annual China's Beluga Migration in the summer.
But this is not just an economic engine to be nourished: there is a longing for families and the next generation to choose Churchill, striving for it and to sacrifice everything he can offer.
Vayat Dale was one of those children who asked their parents to move on south. His father Dave, a dog -muser and owner of a tourist campaign, shook his head and said to him, “We have dogs, here we earn a living.” And it was the end of this particular conversation.
He watched as his friends and their families depart – especially in the secondary school years – looking for “best opportunities”. After graduation, he traveled around the world, working in the tourist industry in Australia and Cologne. But he came home. Back to dogs and return to Churchill.
Churchill, he said, gave him “everything”. He feels connected to dogs, with the ground. His father is his best friend. And this is exactly what he wants for his own son Noah – now 3 years – who also has a commitment to dogs.
“I remember he was a small child and skiing with his dad and playing excursions,” he says. “That's what I look forward to the majority.
But this heritage threatens the warming of the Arctic, and this is the weight that they fights when they fight to protect their lifestyle in the north.
“It's a terrible thought to think that white bears can't be here one day,” says Dave Dale. “Planet Earth is a living creature, and we are the ones who walk on it and changes everything. I think we really need to handle it and start taking it seriously.”
