During an Arctic expedition in 2013, photographer Andy Mann was looking through binoculars from his boat when something strange caught his attention on the shore of a glacier in Franz Josef Land, Russia.
They decided to approach in a small boat to find out what it was. Then they saw it: the body of a polar bear hanging from the glacier wall by its legs, in a scene that seemed impossible.
“It was a polar bear, hanging by its legs, apparently melting out of the glacier“, Mann recalled years later. And the story became even stranger.
The photographer suggested climbing the glacier with Cory Richards, setting up ropes, and cutting off the remains to bring them aboard and study them with the team of scientists taking part in the expedition. But the captain wouldn’t allow it.
Ever since, one question has remained unanswered. Could it have been a bear that had been preserved for a very long time? Or had it simply died at a higher elevation and later slid down and fallen into a crevasse, where its remains eventually became exposed?
Even Mann doesn’t know the answer. “It’s still the strangest thing I’ve found in my 15 years exploring the Arctic“, he wrote.
And perhaps that is precisely what is most unsettling: no one was able to study the body to find out how long it had been there or how it ended up hanging from that glacier.