Word: polarizer
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Ecotours are often about native culture as well as animals. At Knight Inlet in western Canada, guests may visit the home village of guide Nick Chowdhury, a member of the Tanakteuk Band. Across the country in a very different landscape, Cree guides lead animal lovers in Polar Bear Provincial Park. Traveling with Free Spirit Air Adventures www.elmhirst.com) Alice Piacentini of Prospect, Ohio, flew with her husband, four children ranging then from six to 14, and her parents-in-law to the 9,100-sq.-mi. park in northern Ontario. While everyone in the family was thrilled by the bears, they...
...cruise to the North Pole aboard the Russian icebreaker Yamal, tourists told the New York Times that a mile-wide lake had opened up at 90[degrees] north, with gulls fluttering overhead, and they had the pictures to prove it. The newspaper declared that such an opening in polar ice was possibly a first in 50 million years, though that claim was dismissed by scientists who nonetheless see other serious signs of Arctic warming (see box, page...
...also forms as much as two weeks later in the autumn than it used to in Hudson Bay, creating a bewildering situation for some of the local wildlife. Polar bears that ordinarily emerge from their summer dens and walk north up Cape Churchill before proceeding directly onto the ice now arrive at their customary departure point and find open water. Unable to move forward, the bears turn left and continue walking right into town, arriving emaciated and hungry. To reduce unscheduled encounters between townspeople and the carnivores, natural-resource officer Wade Roberts and his deputies tranquilize the bears with...
Telling evidence of global warming, right? Not necessarily, climatologists quickly pointed out. Thanks to wind and waves, without any help at all from rising temperatures, fissures often form in the polar ice, especially in the warmer summer months. "In fact," says Claire Parkinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, whose satellites have long kept an eye on the polar ice cap, "it happens many, many times every year." Sometimes the openings can be hundreds of miles long, explains the Jet Propulsion Lab's Ronald Kwok, another Arctic observer...
Even so, the scientists did not dispute the many other signs of warming in the Arctic. It's just that one opening in the ice, even at the pole itself, doesn't mean a polar meltdown. But what about those ivory gulls? Aren't they pretty rare birds in a locale known more for fauna like polar bears? Not really, explains the Audubon Society's John Bianchi, who points out that the tough gulls are regular inhabitants of the Arctic Ocean. "If you've got open water at the pole or anywhere else up there," he says, "you're going...