Indeed, through January, the season’s sea-ice return is closely tracking that of ice during the winter of 2006-2007, according to data the center released earlier this week. The below average return of sea ice then contributed to a record low summer-ice extent during the 2007 melt season.

Climate scientists keep close tabs on the Arctic Ocean’s ice – particularly during the sun-drenched melt season – because the ice’s ability to reflect sunlight back into space has a significant influence on climate worldwide, more so than Antarctica’s sea ice, researchers say.

Antarctica’s sea ice builds quickly during its winter months and extends over large areas of the ocean surrounding the continent, even as the Arctic Ocean’s ice retreats.

But Antarctic sea ice shrinks quickly during its melt season, covering only a tiny fraction of the area it spans during the Austral winter, when it’s dark. Arctic Ocean sea ice, by contrast, typically extends over much of the Arctic Ocean, even through the melt season, reflecting sunlight and keeping the region cooler than it otherwise would be.

In January, Arctic sea ice covered 13.6 million square miles of ocean, nearly 20,000 square miles below the previous record low in January 2006 and some 490,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average.

The drivers for January’s record low extent, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, included a natural climate pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation, as well as residual heat from the Arctic Ocean, captured and retained during the previous melt season.

When the Arctic Oscillation is in a negative phase, wind patterns change in ways that can permit frigid Arctic air to plunge farther south than usual, accounting for below-normal winter temperatures in much of the US in January, including the South.

At the same time however, Arctic temperatures can run above normal during a negative phase. In January, much of the region experienced temperatures between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to the NSIDC.

As February began the oscillation switched to a positive phase, which could speed ice growth for a period, according to the center.

But the prognosis for ice extent during the upcoming melt season isn’t good, according to Mark Serreze, who heads the NSIDC.

Even if the ice were to reach a winter expanse nearer normal, “a lot of that ice is thin, first-year stuff, and it’s going to tend to melt out easily” come spring, he says.

Indeed, he adds, the thickness of the ice heading into the melt season is a bigger factor than overall winter extent in determining how severe the spring melt-back is likely to be. Researchers over the past several years have documented a decline in older ice and an increase in thinner ice at the start of the melt season.

“We know right now, that we’ll be continuing that pattern” heading into the 2011 melt season, he says.

Nor is he looking for help from the Arctic Oscillation. While the strong negative this winter has kept things relatively toasty during an Arctic winter, it historically has tended to set up conditions that kept ice in the Arctic Ocean basin during the melt season. Winds also would spread the ice out, allowing more ice to grow in the wide cracks between floes.

Until last year, that is.

In a paper published Jan. 29 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by Julienne Stroeve, also with the NSIDC, found that last winter’s strongly negative Arctic Oscillation had its own unusual circulation pattern, which ultimately provided no help in retaining ice during the 2010 melt season. Instead, last melt season registered the third lowest summer-ice extent on record.

“It appears we’re entering a new regime where old rules don’t apply anyone,” he says.

Since satellites began tracking Arctic sea-ice extend continuously in 1979, the maximum and minimum sea-ice extents have been steadily shrinking, when stacked against their 1979 to 2000 averages.

Researchers attribute the long-term to a self-reinforcing trend, or feedback, associated with global warming. As ice cover shrinks during the melt season, more of the ocean, darker than the ice, is exposed to absorb sunlight and retain it as heat. As fall arrives, the ocean releases the heat, slowing the return of sea ice.

Indeed, researchers are exploring the possibility that increases in ice loss could be driving the Arctic Oscillation into a negative phase more often than not. The jury is still out, Serreze says.

Polar Bears need chunks of ice to rest on when they take breaks from their long swimming sessions. According to the Los Angeles Times, thanks to GPS tracking technology we now know exactly how long these incredible beasts could swim just to reach that elusive piece of ice. The article cites a scientific publication which reported that a polar bear with a GPS tracker strapped around its neck swam for nine days and an astonishing 426 miles across the Arctic Ocean before it was able to find a solid surface to rest on. Its young cub that started the journey perished along the way.

Because GPS is based on satellites, the location-finding system can be used all over the world. When they are specially crafted for extreme environments, they can even be used in the most inhospitable parts of the world like the North Pole in this case. The researchers in this case probably had to resort to passive loggers, because real time tracking is only available where there are cell phone networks and/or special private satellites that can broadcast positioning info back to the web. Where there are no people like in the Arctic Ocean, there generally is insufficient satellite and cell phone network coverage for GPS active tracking.

The bear in the study lost a mind-boggling one hundred pounds of weight as it struggled to find a chunk of ice. Scientists maintain that this provides incontrovertible evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing. Hopefully with all this new data that GPS loggers make possible, we will take all appropriate steps to limit this potentially catastrophic trend from continuing.

 The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said a deal last month allowing BP and Russian state-run major Rosneft access to untapped reserves in the Kara Sea violated the boundaries of two Russian national parks in one of the world’s last true wildernesses.

 The conservation group says the area licensed to the oil majors for exploration through to 2040 by the Russian government snips off some 45 square kilometers (17 square miles) of protected land.

 A WWF map shows the Novaya Zemlya archipelago enclosing the Kara Sea to the North and the Yamal Peninsula jutting into the sea’s southern shore could be threatened by the drilling.

 “Surely we are not so desperate for oil that we will tear down the boundaries of protected areas to get it,” Aleksey Knizhnikov of WWF-Russia said in a statement.

 “These protected areas are now in peril. The natural values they were set up to protect — pristine ecosystems, the seabirds, the polar bears, the marine mammals — are in jeopardy,” he added.

 BP said the two oil majors “believe that we can carry out this exploration programme safely and responsibly,” a spokesman for BP in Russia said by telephone.

 “Lessons learned from the Gulf of Mexico incident and spill will be carried through to this project,” he added.

 The two oil majors say the three Kara Sea blocks could contain oil reserves equal to the volumes of the UK North Sea, meaning a lucrative catch of around 60 billion barrels.

 But in the wake of BP’s catastrophic leak in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, experts warn the damage from drilling in the fragile Arctic ecosystem or oil leaks under the ice could be far worse than in warmer deepwater climates.

 The Russian Arctic park, designated by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Novaya Zemlya in 2009, is one of the most important breeding grounds for polar bears, a year-round haven for walrus and home to the rare narwhal and Greenland whale, according to the Russian ministry of natural resources.

WWF activists urged the Russian government to pause oil and gas exploration in the fragile Arctic until strict regulations and preventive measure are put in place to protect the region’s wildlife and fauna.

 “Parking oil rigs beside protected areas is definitely not going to help,” Alexander Shestakov, director of the WWF’s Global Arctic Programme, said in the statement.

 “In the light of the climate driven changes in this region, and across the Arctic, we need to be looking at ways in which we can help Arctic animals and peoples transition to a new and very different reality.”

 The Russian government, a majority shareholder in Rosneft, gets more than 50 percent of its revenues from oil and gas and Putin’s stated aim is to keep producing more than 10 billion barrels a day through 2020.

As global temperatures rise, scientists have noted that sea ice in the Arctic is getting thinner. They expect that by mid century, a passage through the ice sheet will be available for at least one month each summer.

A paper by a trio of researchers explores what the loss of this nearly-continent-size barrier could mean for species inhabiting the region. The paper lists 22 species that are at risk of hybridization, including the narwhal and the polar bear. Of those, about 14 are threatened or will soon be threatened. They say that such interbreeding between such species is already occurring — an animal that was a mix of grizzly bear and polar bear was found in 2006, for example — and will probably increase.

The long-term results could be devastating because the genes of many of these species developed over millenniums in isolated populations, giving these Arctic marine animals sets of fine-tuned adaptations that helping them uniquely thrive in the harsh environment, the researchers write.

The paper was authored by Brendan Kelly, a marine mammalogist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine mammal lab in Juneau, Alaska; Andrew Whiteley, a conservation geneticist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and David Tallmon, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Alaska.

Normally, species have pre-mating isolating mechanisms in place, Dr. Whiteley said. “Signals the animals use could be behavioral — for example, bird songs — or morphological, maybe related to bright colors,” he said.

When species have evolved together, these isolating mechanisms are advantageous because hybrids tend to lose out in natural selection. “However, if species have evolved in separate habitats and in isolation from each other, they tend to lose these isolating mechanisms,” he said.

Sea ice in the Arctic is expected to disappear altogether in the summer months by the end of this century. And, writing in Nature, researchers say that this could mean the extinction of some rare marine mammals and the loss of many adaptive gene combinations.

More than 20 marine mammal species are believed to be at risk of hybridization, and several Arctic hybrids have already been identified through DNA testing. For example, hunters shot a white bear with brown patches in 2006 that was later confirmed to be a polar bear-grizzly bear hybrid.

Marine mammalogist Brendan Kelly of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine mammal lab says that genes developed over millennia in isolated populations have given many Arctic marine animals sets of fine-tuned adaptations, helping them uniquely thrive in the harsh environment.

The authors acknowledge that hybridization can actually be a good thing, especially for the first generation. But in later generations, the process begins to have more negative effects.

Genes related to traits that once allowed the animal to thrive in a specific habitat can become diluted, leaving the animal less well adapted to its environment.

In the case of creatures such as the rare North Pacific right whale, of which fewer than 200 individuals are believed to be left, interbreeding with the much more numberous bowhead whalescould mean extinction.

We begin our journey through the fabled Northwest Passage in Resolute Bay, at the southern tip of Cornwallis Island, just 1700 kilometres shy of the North Pole. To reach Resolute Bay, a community of about 200 people, from Montreal, we’ve flown north for five hours, leaving the Arctic Circle far behind us.

On arrival, I take a stroll around the sparse hamlet the Arctic’s indigenous people, the Inuit, call Quaasuittuq. The sky is blue, the late-August temperature a mild 6 degrees and the snowless ground is rocky grey. Morose-looking brown hills overlook the town and out in the bay, two drifting ice patches catch the sunlight. Behind them, Cruise North’s ice-strengthened ship, the Lyubov Orlova, stands at anchor, waiting for its 65 passengers to embark.

Nearby, huskies are yelping on their tethers, a dozen bloody caribou hides are drying on the ground and arrayed on a table are the skulls of a polar bear and a musk ox, a shaggy, Arctic creature that grows two metres long and 1½ metres tall.

”Want to buy some polar bear claws?” inquires a raggedy, near-toothless Inuit man as I survey the skulls. ”They’re $75 each,” he adds, proffering several curved claws the size of my middle finger.

This part of the Canadian Arctic is one of the last travel frontiers, a place so defiantly remote that it may never be touched by the tentacles of mass tourism. Resolute Bay is not the starting point for a cocktail-swilling luxury cruise. It’s where an eight-day expedition through largely uncharted waters begins.

Days before our departure, the Clipper Adventurer, the only other cruise ship in the region, ran aground while exploring the Northwest Passage and its passengers had to be rescued by the Canadian Coast Guard. You know you’re in adventurous territory, too, when you’re shadowing SBS TV’s wilderness guru, Bear Grylls, simultaneously plying a route through the passage in an inflatable boat.

In the 19th century, finding a north-west passage through the frozen Arctic Ocean – and a time-saving northern trade route between the Atlantic and Pacific – was the maritime explorer’s holy grail. Several, including John Franklin, governor of Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) between 1836 and 1843, tried and failed and many men died during the quest. When the ageing Franklin’s third expedition, with two fully laden ships, vanished in 1845, it triggered not only one of history’s most concerted rescue efforts but also decades of exploration. However, it wasn’t until 1906 that Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen made the first full transit.

”We’re about to enter an ice field,” comes an announcement over the Orlova’s PA soon after we leave Resolute, ”in case the ship starts taking any hits.” Minutes later, I’m unpacking in my comfortable fourth-deck cabin when there is a dull thud. I stick my head out of my porthole and watch as the ship’s steel-plated hull pushes aside a bus-sized white wedge.

”We’re actually heading to the least amount of ice ever in the Arctic,” says the president of Cruise North, and marine engineer, Dugald Wells, later. ”But in spite of a 13 per cent decrease in sea ice in the past 15 years, there’s only been clear passage here for about five years.”

On this expedition, the plan is to voyage south-west through the straits and channels of the Canadian Arctic archipelago to Cambridge Bay, on vast Victoria Island, before taking a different route back to Resolute. ”But,” says the expedition leader, 29-year-old Inuit Jason Annahatak, at the outset, ”I want to enlist you as being flexible passengers as we’re on top of the world right now and don’t know what conditions we’ll encounter.”

On our first morning, after more bumps in the night, we reach a bay at the southern tip of Somerset Island in a slow-lifting fog.

Following breakfast, we’re taken ashore on inflatables for a hike. It’s our first taste of Arctic tundra, an apparently barren, rubbly-looking landscape underlaid by up to 450 metres of permafrost. Yet as we trudge across the boggy hills with the expedition’s botanist, Liz Bradfield, we find hardy purple saxifrage flowers, the spreading yellow roots of the ant-high Arctic Willow tree and splashes of wispy Arctic cotton. As the sun breaks through, creating a perfect fog-bow above a lake, we also discover evidence of previous human occupation in centuries-old tent rings and discarded tools.

While exploration history and wildlife are the main attractions for passengers on this expedition, another is Inuit culture. Believed to be of Mongolian origin and to have reached North America via the Bering Sea, the Inuit and their ancestors, the Thule, have had a presence in the Canadian Arctic for 1000 years. Superbly adapted to the freezing climate, they were traditionally nomadic but today the 150,000 Inuit are mostly settled in small communities across the Arctic.

Travelling with the Inuit-owned Cruise North opens doors to these communities and during the first few days of our trip we visit two. The first we reach is Gjoa Haven, on King William Island, where Amundsen overwintered during his successful attempt on the Northwest Passage. We learn more about Amundsen’s voyage at the Gjoa Haven Heritage Centre, where we chat with a local historian, Louie Kamookak.

Later, in the community arena, we are treated to a cultural show, which the entire 1200-strong population seems to attend. It opens with an old man drum-dancing, shuffling and weaving to the measured beat of his own large, narrow drum and continues with a display of Inuit throat-singing. During this display, two women face each other and conjure sounds like the whistling wind and the call of snow geese from their gullets, before collapsing in fits of giggles.

At Cambridge Bay, the central Arctic’s largest community, where we arrive two nights later, we’re given an equally rousing reception. Another performance is put on, including an Arctic fashion parade featuring clothing crafted from native animals and an unforgettable solo throat-singer, who keeps one warble going for 14 uninterrupted minutes.

On our departure from Cambridge Bay, heavy pack-ice to our north requires us to back-track, entailing 40 hours at sea. We pass the time with lectures on Northwest Passage history, modern Inuit society and a trill-filled talk on Arctic birds from the ship’s naturalist, George Sirk.

The long sail is also an opportunity to get to know Cruise North’s multitalented crew, including four young Inuit, and our fellow passengers, aged from five to 83. Most are from elsewhere in Canada or the US and Europe. But there’s also an Inuit grandma, mum and two small girls enjoying a holiday from Resolute Bay and three adventurous Australians.

We commune over deliciously fresh, well-rounded meals in the Orlova’s dining room or gather on deck to spot wildlife in the glassy Arctic Ocean. We’re looking for bearded seals, which oblige, and elusive narwhals, a small endemic whale with a unicorn-like tusk, which we don’t find.

By now, five days into the expedition, close to an area known as ”the Serengeti of the Arctic” for its abundance of species, we’re impatient to see more of this region’s extraordinary creatures. When we get ashore again at Cape Felix, at the northern tip of King William Island, we find caribou and wolf tracks and huge polar bear paw prints on the beach but none of these animals themselves.

On the other hand, it’s another warm, clear-sky day, with small icebergs floating in the gently rippling bay. Perfect, some of us decide, for an Arctic swim. With defibrillator on hand, we plunge into the 1-degree sea. I attempt to snorkel around the nearest ice floe, intent on inspecting its underside, but I soon lose feeling in my hands and feet and beat a hasty retreat.

The next day we awake at 5am to a glorious scene. Dazzling sunshine is illuminating the narrow, ice-packed Bellot Strait, jammed between the steep-sided cliffs of the Boothia Peninsula and Somerset Island.

We hurry to the inflatables and plot a path into the midst of the fragmented ice. Almost immediately, we see bearded seals playing in the water and congregations of the gull-like northern fulmar, relative of the albatross, on ice floes. Weaving further into the strait, Pradeep, a passenger on my inflatable, suddenly spots something through his binoculars.

”Polar bears!” he cries.

”Up there, high on the ridge,” Pradeep points, ”a mother and a cub.”

We manoeuvre through the ice to get a closer look. By now, the bears have seen us and are on the move. To our surprise, the mother is ushering her cub down the 100-metre cliff face. Soon, they are level with us, settling on an ice ledge at the edge of the channel. They watch as we glide to within 50 metres of them, the two-year-old cub’s paws flopped nonchalantly over the side of the floe. We hardly dare breathe in case we scare them. But even after several other boats arrive, the bears happily rest there. It’s 10 minutes before the mother nimbly leads her cub back up the ridge. They’re the first of 12 polar bears we see on this outstanding day.

Later that morning, we go ashore at Fitzroy Inlet, midway up the Somerset Island coast. A group of us are trekking through a valley with an armed guide, Jason Annahatak, when we see what looks like a moving boulder in the distance. We ascend to an outcrop above the valley and look down on a solitary musk ox, brunching on mossy grasses. Then the extravagantly shaggy creature begins climbing the hill from which we are watching. As it gets closer, we huddle together behind Annahatak, who is preparing to fire a warning shot. For 30 seconds we stare straight into the ox’s powerful, dark face, wondering whether it will charge us. Finally, it just continues up the ridge.

”The wildlife approached us,” our naturalist, Sirk, says later, ”and there is a really good chance the musk ox has never seen a human before because there is no habitation in any direction for 200 kilometres.”

”Good morning everybody,” announces our expedition leader, Annahatak, over the tannoy on our penultimate day. ”There’s a polar bear on the beach having its breakfast.”

The carnage is still in progress when, an hour later, we reach the scene, beneath the 150-metre bluffs of Devon Island. As we bob about in inflatables, 20 metres away, the adult male, its face, paws and backside scarlet with blood, barely raises its head from its washed-up narwhal treat. Eventually sated, it sinks down for a post-prandial nap.

At our last stop before Resolute Bay, on Beechy Island, we get even closer to two snow-white Arctic hares on the beach but they’re just a distraction here. We are at the grave site of three men from Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition and another who died during the decades-long search for the explorer. It was on these bleak, pebbly shores that Franklin’s team spent the first winter of their quest to discover the Northwest Passage. All 129 men perished in that fruitless search and Franklin’s ships, Erebus and Terror, have still not been located.

While Beechy Island is a poignant place to conclude an unforgettable trip full of the wonders of Arctic life, it’s perfectly apt. For it’s the history of epic journeys through an unknown, unforgiving land, with its tales of Victorian folly and unsolved mysteries, which continues to give the Northwest Passage an almost mythical allure.

According to telegraph.co, polar bear cubs are starving as a result of climate change, according to experts, because global warming is causing the sea ice to melt.

New video footage shows a mother bear and two cubs in Hudson Bay, Canada, desperately searching for food. One of the cubs experiences seizures in the video, and both cubs died within two days of the filming.

Kassie Siegel, director of US research group Center for Biological Diversity, said the bears are dying as a result of climate change.

“Although it’s difficult to watch, this video is an important document of the terrible cost of climate change denial and inaction,” she said. “Global warming isn’t a crisis that’s decades away. It’s here now. The sad truth is that polar bears are already starving as global warming melts the Arctic.”

The melting of the sea ice in western Hudson Bay is now about three weeks earlier than it was 30 years ago, according to CBD, while freeze-up comes several weeks later. This means the bears have less time for hunting seals and other prey.

The western Hudson Bay polar bear population declined 22 percent between 1987 and 2004.

The footage was released to coincide with key climate change talks in Cancun, Mexcio.

More than 190 countries are gathered in the luxury resort to try and reach a global deal to keep temperature rise below 2C.

Ms Siegel said more polar bears will suffer unless a deal is reached.

“In November I was in the area where this video was shot, and it was clear polar bears were having a very hard time,” she said. “The loss of sea ice has tragic consequences for them. It’s going to get far worse if world leaders don’t address this unprecedented global crisis effectively, making deep cuts in greenhouse pollution.”

The phenomenon, revealed while tagging and tracking polar bears, is thought to be new and the result of the bears having to swim longer distances in the sea because of reductions in the Arctic ice in the summer.

The scientists say that in the face of the longer swims, travelling on the mother’s back could be vital for the survival of the cubs in waters surrounding scattered ice, which is prime seal-hunting territory for the animals.

Polar bears live, breed, hunt, and travel for the most part on sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. Some of that ice is melting as a result of climate change.

You don’t have to get into the broader debate over what U.S. and international policy should be in response to that issue to conclude that melting of the frozen waters where polar bears live means that they risk moving from “threatened” to “endangered” status and eventually extinction.

The Obama Administration’s response is to designate a large area as critical habitat for polar bears. Oil and gas companies oppose this move, claiming that it will make their exploitation of energy resources off Alaska more expensive and cumbersome.

As a result of these complaints, the Interior Department designated a smaller protected area for the bears than initially had been recommended. Economic activity is not forbidden in this habitat area, although its impact on the bears must be taken into account before future oil and gas drilling can occur.

The administration made the right decision. The United States must take measures on a broad front to anticipate the destructive effects of climate change.

Without getting sentimental about polar bears, it is important that the nation act to improve their chances of survival, even if it costs a little money.

But a fierce storm in the region Thursday has temperatures dropping and ice forming, which could be good news for the bears. “It’s just howling,” Luc Desjardins, of the Canadian Ice Service, says of the storm that could change the fortunes of the hungry bears.

Until the storm hit, record-breaking conditions in the western Arctic this fall had kept the ice at bay. Temperatures up to 14 C above normal in one Arctic region in November prevented the formation of ice which was almost a month behind schedule as of Monday, says Desjardins. He says the ice cover was the lowest since 1971, covering just 1.5 per cent of the sea, compared to the average of 20 per cent by mid-November.

Polar bears need sea ice to hunt for seals and other marine mammals. And after slim pickings on land in the summer, they are ready to get back on the ice come fall.

To get a read on the population, a helicopter survey was done Monday by conservation groups, Manitoba Conservation, and the York Factory First Nation Resource Management Board. The spotters counted 333 polar bears prowling the Manitoba coast of Hudson Bay.

Pete Ewins, an Arctic specialist for the World Wildlife Fund which helped co-ordinate the survey, says several “skinny bears” ended up in the “bear jail” in Churchill, Man., in September after scrounging for food where they were not welcome.

But the bears spotted in the survey appeared in “reasonably good condition,” says Ewins. They were mostly males, as females with cubs tend to steer clear of the males and travel inland.

“It is not a catastrophe about to happen tomorrow,” Ewins says of toll the ice delay will take on the bears. “But the longer the ice is in returning, of course, the more bears are going to be in very weak condition when they actually make it out on the sea ice.” The “enduring concern,” he says, is late ice in Hudson Bay is an increasingly common phenomenon, that is linked to climate change.

Desjardins says the ice has been late forming for several years running, in large part because Arctic air temperatures have been so warm. From October 2009 to April 2010, the Baffin Bay was on average 7 C above normal.

“It was tremendously warm in the Arctic during the past winter,” Desjardins said, noting that the ice melted faster last spring, allowing the water to absorb more heat, which is now delaying formation of new ice.

This fall the trend has continued with the average temperature in Nunavut’s Northern Foxe Basin 14 C above normal in November, he said.

But Desjardins says that ice conditions in Hudson Bay can — and are — changing quickly. This week’s storm has temperatures dropping so fast that a fringe of thin ice almost 20 kilometres wide has formed along parts of the coast since Monday.

It cold conditions persist he says thick ice could form over the next few weeks and may even catch up to normal. “It all depends on what Mother Nature throws at us,” Desjardins.