Franz Josef Land
According to the Polar bear specialist group of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) is now considered as “vulnerable”, one of the three categories on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Barents Sea sub-population (including Svalbard and Franz Josef Land archipelagos), after suffering depletion for over-harvesting, has increased following a total ban on hunting in 1973 in Norway and in 1956 in Russia. New threats for this species are the spread of pollutants, increase of human activities for oil exploration and climatic change which causes, in some areas a complete loss of sea ice cover in summer.
WWF is running a polar bear tracking project. Positions of bears around Svalbard islands can be displayed in real time on Google Earth.
Polar bears spend much of their time near the edge of the pack ice. This is where they are most likely to find food during winter and spring. When the ice cap melts in summer most bears spend their summers on land, living off body fat stored from successful hunting in the spring and winter. Increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing temperatures around the globe to rise. As a result, sea ice in the Arctic is melting earlier and forming later each year. As a consequence of this polar bears are left with less time to hunt for food.
Franz Josef Land
Franz Josef Land archipelago was officially discovered in 1873 by the Austrian polar explorers Payer and Weyprecht and is the northernmost land associated with Eurasia with latitude ranging from 80° to 82°.
In 2005 the Payer-Weyprecht Memorial expedition followed the historic footsteps of the two Austrian explorers. The German language website features an impressive photo gallery.
Drifting ice
Drifting sea ice plays an important role in the redistribution of sediments and contaminants; ice motion vectors can be back-tracked by acquiring long term time series of satellite data.
On a global scale, arctic currents strongly influence climate by favouring heat exchange between polar regions and the oceans.
Franz Josef Land lies on a circulation feature called the Barents Gyre where warmer Atlantic waters from the South mix with colder Arctic waters, thus affecting sea ice extent and blooming of phytoplankton during summer.
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image (417 KB) of drifting ice around Franz Josef
Land
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image (1060 KB), a detail of broken ice cap
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image (734 KB), some other drifting ice close
to the
largest island of the archipelago (Semlja Georga)
largest island of the archipelago (Semlja Georga)
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