Andy Mann has spent 15 years exploring the Arctic and says that this is still the strangest thing he’s ever seen.
It was 2013, and he was in Franz Josef Land, Russia, alongside photographer Cory Richards, on a mission for National Geographic. From the deck of the ship, looking through his binoculars, he noticed something that didn’t belong on the glacier wall. Something was hanging from the edge of the ice. They lowered a Zodiac dinghy and approached as close as the rough seas and rocks would allow.
It was a polar bear. It was hanging by its legs, as if the glacier were slowly letting it go.
Mann then suggested climbing the ice, securing a rope with ice screws, and lowering himself down to cut it free and study it aboard with the team’s scientists. But the captain rejected the idea, so they couldn’t retrieve it or study it up close, and they never found out how long it had been there.
Polar bears emerged as a species hundreds of thousands of years ago; a genetic study published in 2012 put their divergence from brown bears at around 600,000 years ago.
Could this be the oldest and northernmost polar bear specimen ever preserved? Or did it die recently, slip into a crevasse, and only just get expelled by the glacier? They’ll never know.
And you, what do you think it was?