Record Polar Bear Dive Linked to Climate Change

A polar bear’s record dive, lasting 3 minutes 10 seconds, was captured on camera on August 19 2014, about 13 nautical miles, or 24 km, from the North Pole. The footage of the dive, filmed by an engineer traveling with Arctic adventurer Rinie van Meurs, was only released this month, along with a paper on the dive published in Polar Biology.

With Ian Stirling, van Meurs wrote that the “maximum dive duration for a wild polar bear of any age is unknown,” but that this is the “longest dive reported to date.” The bear was hunting three seals lying at the edge of an ice floe, and “swam 45–50 m without surfacing to breathe or to reorient itself”. The pair say that the length of the dive may be linked to the depletion of sea ice as a result of climate change, with polar bears working to adapt to the expanding areas of water in the Arctic Circle. Credit: Derryn Cooper