Article from English Newspaper

This is an article taken from The Daily Mirror, a newspaper in England, the Mirror is not know as one of the more ''intellectual'' newspapers so I cannot vouch for it, but the last part under the heading The Ocean Deep is the part that I am interested in.

It would be interesting to know exactly what they mean by feeding on fish, are they just talking about fry or something larger?

5 November 2006

MELTDOWN

Man behind the BBC's Planet Earth reveals the devastating cost of global warming

Exclusive by Nigel Blundell

THIS polar bear is swimming for its life. Once, the largest carnivore on Earth would have stalked the vast polar wilderness of floating sea ice in search of its prey.

Now this male bear is cast adrift, paddling furiously across an opening ocean in search of the seals that would once have been easy pickings. His natural habitat, the icy Arctic platform where he lives his whole life, is melting thanks to global warming.

"As a symbol for the future of our planet, these images are a very powerful warning," says Alastair Fothergill, executive producer of the award-winning Planet Earth series which returns to BBC1 tonight. "It was simply harrowing to watch."

Today's population of 20,000 polar bears faces being cut by a third by 2050 and the species may be extinct by 2100 as the ice melts away in the summer months. Their future is as precarious as the slippery ground they tread.

This year the Arctic, which is warming up quicker than anywhere on Earth, saw spring start 17 days earlier than usual.

In summer America's NASA space agency reported a 14 per cent loss in the North Pole ice cap, an area of 730,000 sq km - the size of Pakistan. The amount of ice today is the lowest since full records began in 1978. Last week the Stern report on climate change warned drastic action is needed now to halt carbon emissions and prevent natural disasters across the globe.

The fate of the world is the theme of 46-year-old Fothergill's new £7million, six-part global odyssey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

Today, exclusively for the Sunday Mirror, he looks at the state of the planet through the six locations he has visited to make the new series...

The Ice Worlds

THERE is no doubt that if you want to see global warming in action right now, you should go to the Poles.

At the start of the first series we followed a polar bear mother and her two cubs emerging from their snow den. We were overjoyed to see they had survived when we found them again for the opening shots of the new series.

The family were followed by a helicopter team as they embarked on a perilous wilderness trek never before filmed.

They are seen marching across sea ice to get to their sole food supply, seals. But that sea ice is melting at an unprecedented rate.

The most harrowingly scenes came when the fully-grown male polar bear (pictured right) is filmed wading through melting slush as its ice world literally disappears beneath him. He then swims 100 kilometres in search of sea ice to hunt for seals, before finally arriving exhausted on a rocky island.

There, exhausted and starving, he is forced to attack a walrus - a hugely dangerous operation. The result of this battle of giants is most tragic as viewers will be able to see.

As the sea ice melts, and melts earlier every year, the one animal that is most immediately affected is the polar bear.

If the sea ice melts, that's the end of the polar bear. The Poles are cold because the heat arriving there from the sun is weaker. And it remains cold because 90 per cent of sunlight is reflected back by the white snow and ice. But as the snow melts, less sunlight is reflected and the damage is self-perpetuating.

The speed of melt is the key threat to human beings because of the rise of sea levels. World population centres tended to be built on low-lying estuaries so we're talking about the future of cities like London and New York.

The Great Plains

THE greatest gatherings of wildlife found anywhere on Earth are on the plains of Africa, Asia and North America.

All these migrating animals are following the most successful plant on the planet - grass, nurtured by rains.

As the world warms up the weather systems will change, altering the direction of winds and ocean currents, and bringing floods to dry areas and droughts to others.

While making Trials of Life in the late 1990s I filmed a million Saiga antelope migrating across the plains of central Asia. Filming this episode of Planet Earth, we found just 30,000.

The Jungles

FIFTY per cent of the world's species live on just three per cent of the world's surface - rainforests.

We returned to Uganda to look at the plight of man's closest cousin, the chimpanzees.They are just hanging on in the remaining areas of jungle. Everywhere jungles are being cut down for agriculture - usually by "slashing and burning" which creates its own damaging smoke emissions.

The rainforests are the "lungs" of the Earth. Continued deforestation clearly increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The forests, which turn that carbon into oxygen - vital for life - also rely on almost constant rainfall.

The Shallow Seas

CORAL seas are the richest marine environments in the world, and Raja Amput, between Papua-New Guinea and Indonesia, is recognised as the centre of biodiversity in the oceans.

When the coral becomes stressed - by a slight rise in temperature, change in salinity or pollution - it becomes "bleached" and soon dies. Only six per cent of the coral reefs in this area have not been damaged.

Pollution is a problem but the far greater threat is global warming. There is now real concern that rising sea temperatures will irreparably damage the world's coral reefs.

The Seasonal Forests

EVERY third tree on the planet is in the Taiga Forest, a belt of woodland that goes around the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Through Siberia and Northern Canada, the forest provides a home for wildlife such as lynx and wolverine. But it has another, absolutely vital role - in creating so much oxygen for the atmosphere.

The Taiga is receding as temperatures rise - leaving bare tundra in its wake, Permafrost used to seal up the tundra for most of the year but it is increasingly melting, releasing its vast store of methane a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The Ocean Deep

THE good news is that the deep oceans seem less affected by global warming... so far. Some experts fear sea levels may rise by more than a metre by 2100 because of melting icecaps.

From helicopters, Planet Earth film- makers used their Cineflex Heli-gimbal cameras to find evidence that evolution is already kicking in. A 30-ton whale shark was filmed off Venezuela gorging on fish rather than its normal plankton diet, proof that adaptation is the key to survival.