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My journey to become a polar specialist,
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photographing, specializing in the polar regions,
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began when I was four years old,
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when my family moved from Southern Canada
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to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland.
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There we lived with the Inuit
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in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people,
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where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families.
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And in this community, we didn't have a television;
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we didn't have computers, obviously, radio.
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We didn't even have a telephone.
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All of my time was spent outside
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with the Inuit, playing.
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The snow and the ice were my sandbox,
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and the Inuit were my teachers.
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And that's where I became
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truly obsessed with this polar realm.
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And I knew someday that I was going to do something
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that had to do with trying to share news about it
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and protect it.
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I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only,
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some images, a cross-section of my work,
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to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "Have You Ever."
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I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before,
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but they're allowing me to show you a few images
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from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet.
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National Geographic doesn't do this,
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so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you.
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And what these images are --
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you'll see them at the start of the slide show -- there's only about four images --
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but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest.
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It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear.
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It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear.
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There are only 200 of these bears left.
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They're more rare than the panda bear.
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I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one.
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I thought, my career's over.
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I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic.
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What in the heck was I thinking?
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So I had two months to sit there
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and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life,
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after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me.
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Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time:
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they publish pictures, not excuses.
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(Laughter)
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And after two months of sitting there --
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one day, thinking that it was all over,
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this incredible big white male came down,
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right beside me, three feet away from me,
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and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it.
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And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream
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of walking around with this bear through the forest.
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He went through this old-growth forest
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and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep.
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And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him,
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just in the forest, and photograph him.
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So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images
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and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions.
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Please enjoy.
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(Music)
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Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫
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♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫
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♫ You're part of the life there ♫
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♫ You're part of something good ♫
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♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫
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♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫
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♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫
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♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫
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♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫
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♫ What's the purpose? ♫
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♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫
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♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫
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♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫
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♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫
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♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫
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♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫
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♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫
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♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫
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♫ You always end up ♫
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♫ Not knowing where to go ♫
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♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫
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♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫
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♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫
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♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫
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♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫
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♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫
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♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫
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(Applause)
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Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over.
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My clock is ticking. Okay, let's stop.
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Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
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We're inundated with news all the time
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that the sea ice is disappearing
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and it's at its lowest level.
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And in fact, scientists were originally saying
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sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years.
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Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic,
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the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years.
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And what does that mean?
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After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news.
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You glaze over with it.
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And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this.
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And I want people to understand and get the concept
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that, if we lose ice,
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we stand to lose an entire ecosystem.
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Projections are that we could lose polar bears; they could become extinct
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in the next 50 to 100 years.
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And there's no better, sexier,
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more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species
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for me to hang my campaign on.
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Polar bears are amazing hunters.
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This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores.
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There was no ice around.
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But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it.
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And this bear swam out to that seal --
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800 lb. bearded seal --
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grabbed it, swam back and ate it.
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And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal,
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that, as I approached him --
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about 20 feet away -- to get this picture,
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his only defense was to keep eating more seal.
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And as he ate, he was so full --
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he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly --
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and as he ate inside one side of his mouth,
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he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth.
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So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive,
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but it's the ice that's disappearing.
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We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic.
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When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago,
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we never found dead bears.
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And in the last four or five years,
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we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place.
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We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea,
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floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out.
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I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice.
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These bears are already showing signs
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of the stress of disappearing ice.
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Here's a mother and her two year-old cub
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were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere,
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and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice,
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which is great for them; they're safe at this point.
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They're not going to die of hypothermia.
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They're going to get to land.
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But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic
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are also receding right now
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to the point that the ice is ending up on land
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and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem.
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These ringed seals, these are the "fatsicles" of the Arctic.
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These little, fat dumplings,
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150-pound bundles of blubber
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are the mainstay of the polar bear.
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And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here.
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These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle
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associated and connected to sea ice.
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They give birth inside the ice,
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and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice.
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And here's a picture of sick ice.
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This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old.
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And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts,
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these big pockets of black water are forming
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and they're grabbing the sun's energy
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and accelerating the melting process.
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And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea.
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The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines;
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the ice is moving all over the place.
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I wish I could spend half an hour telling you
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about how we almost died on this dive.
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But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice,
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that big chunk of ice up in the corner.
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In that one single piece of ice,
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you have 300 species of microorganisms.
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And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice,
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it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice,
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and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed,
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and then you get the zoo plankton feeding on all that life.
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So really what the ice does
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is it acts like a garden.
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It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden.
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Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden.
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Here's me in my office.
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I hope you appreciate yours.
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This is after an hour under the ice.
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I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen;
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I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet.
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And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water.
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After an hour in these conditions,
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it's so extreme that, when I go down,
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almost every dive I vomit into my regulator
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because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head.
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And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over.
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I get to hand my camera to my assistant,
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and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, "Woo. Woo. Woo."
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Which means, "Take my camera."
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And he thinks I'm saying, "Take my picture."
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So we had this little communication breakdown.
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(Laughter)
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But it's worth it.
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I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales,
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and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today,
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but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made.
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I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw,
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and I looked up under the underside of the ice,
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and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo.
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I got very nervous -- no rope, no safety line,
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the whole world is moving around me --
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and I thought, "I'm in trouble."
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But what happened is that the entire underside
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was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods
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moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice,
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giving birth and living out their entire life cycle.
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This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here.
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And when you have low productivity in this, in ice,
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the productivity in copepods go down.
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This is a bowhead whale.
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Supposedly, science is stating
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that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now.
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This very whale right here could be over 250 years old.
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This whale could have been born
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around the start of the Industrial Revolution.
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It could have survived 150 years of whaling.
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And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North
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because of the lives that we're leading in the South.
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Narwhals, these majestic narwhals
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with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here;
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they could be out on the open water.
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But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes
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where they can breathe, catch a breath,
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because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod.
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And the cod are there
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because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods.
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Alright, my favorite part.
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When I'm on my deathbed,
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I'm going to remember one story more than any other.
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Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful,
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I don't think I'll ever have another experience
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like I did with these leopard seals.
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Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation.
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They've got that wryly smile on their mouth.
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They've got those black sinister eyes
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and those spots on their body.
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They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary.
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And tragically in [2003],
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a scientist was taken down and drowned,
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and she was being consumed by a leopard seal.
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And people were like, "We knew they were vicious. We knew they were."
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And so people love to form their opinions.
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And that's when I got a story idea:
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I want to go to Antarctica,
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get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can
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and give them a fair shake --
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find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood.