(image from CABI Images)
Whilst browsing through my Facebook friends’ status update, I came across a post of a recent news report in the BBC Earth News webpage reporting that a polar bear swam continuously for over nine days, covering 687 km, and then intermittently swam and walked on the sea ice surface an additional 1,800 km. The epic journey was recorded by scientists studying bears around the Beaufort Sea, in north of Alaska. Polar bears are known to swim between land and sea icecaps to hunt seals, but this is the first time an animal that spends most of its time on the surface of the sea ice was observed swimming for such a long distance in extremely cold water. Read on to find out why.