photographing, specializing in the polar regions,

began when I was four years old,

when my family moved from Southern Canada

to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland.

There we lived with the Inuit

in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people,

where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families.

And in this community, we didn't have a television;

we didn't have computers, obviously, radio.

We didn't even have a telephone.

All of my time was spent outside

with the Inuit, playing.

The snow and the ice were my sandbox,

and the Inuit were my teachers.

And that's where I became

truly obsessed with this polar realm.

And I knew someday that I was going to do something

that had to do with trying to share news about it

and protect it.

I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only,

some images, a cross-section of my work,

to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "Have You Ever."

I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before,

but they're allowing me to show you a few images

from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet.

National Geographic doesn't do this,

so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you.

And what these images are --

you'll see them at the start of the slide show -- there's only about four images --

but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest.

It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear.

It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear.

There are only 200 of these bears left.

They're more rare than the panda bear.

I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one.

I thought, my career's over.

I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic.

What in the heck was I thinking?

So I had two months to sit there

and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life,

after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me.

Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time:

they publish pictures, not excuses.

(Laughter)

And after two months of sitting there --

one day, thinking that it was all over,

this incredible big white male came down,

right beside me, three feet away from me,

and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it.

And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream

of walking around with this bear through the forest.

He went through this old-growth forest

and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep.

And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him,

just in the forest, and photograph him.

So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images

and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions.

Please enjoy.

(Music)

Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫

♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫

♫ You're part of the life there ♫

♫ You're part of something good ♫

♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫

♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫

♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫

♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫

♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫

♫ What's the purpose? ♫

♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫

♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫

♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫

♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫

♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫

♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫

♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫

♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫

♫ You always end up ♫

♫ Not knowing where to go ♫

♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫

♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫

♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫

♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫

♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫

♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫

♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫

(Applause)

Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over.

My clock is ticking. Okay, let's stop.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

We're inundated with news all the time

that the sea ice is disappearing

and it's at its lowest level.

And in fact, scientists were originally saying

sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years.

Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic,

the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years.

And what does that mean?

After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news.

You glaze over with it.

And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this.

And I want people to understand and get the concept

that, if we lose ice,

we stand to lose an entire ecosystem.

Projections are that we could lose polar bears; they could become extinct

in the next 50 to 100 years.

And there's no better, sexier,

more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species

for me to hang my campaign on.

Polar bears are amazing hunters.

This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores.

There was no ice around.

But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it.

And this bear swam out to that seal --

800 lb. bearded seal --

grabbed it, swam back and ate it.

And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal,

that, as I approached him --

about 20 feet away -- to get this picture,

his only defense was to keep eating more seal.

And as he ate, he was so full --

he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly --

and as he ate inside one side of his mouth,

he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth.

So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive,

but it's the ice that's disappearing.

We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic.

When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago,

we never found dead bears.

And in the last four or five years,

we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place.

We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea,

floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out.

I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice.

These bears are already showing signs

of the stress of disappearing ice.

Here's a mother and her two year-old cub

were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere,

and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice,

which is great for them; they're safe at this point.

They're not going to die of hypothermia.

They're going to get to land.

But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic

are also receding right now

to the point that the ice is ending up on land

and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem.

These ringed seals, these are the "fatsicles" of the Arctic.

These little, fat dumplings,

150-pound bundles of blubber

are the mainstay of the polar bear.

And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here.

These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle

associated and connected to sea ice.

They give birth inside the ice,

and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice.

And here's a picture of sick ice.

This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old.

And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts,

these big pockets of black water are forming

and they're grabbing the sun's energy

and accelerating the melting process.

And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea.

The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines;

the ice is moving all over the place.

I wish I could spend half an hour telling you

about how we almost died on this dive.

But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice,

that big chunk of ice up in the corner.

In that one single piece of ice,

you have 300 species of microorganisms.

And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice,

it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice,

and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed,

and then you get the zoo plankton feeding on all that life.

So really what the ice does

is it acts like a garden.

It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden.

Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden.

Here's me in my office.

I hope you appreciate yours.

This is after an hour under the ice.

I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen;

I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet.

And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water.

After an hour in these conditions,

it's so extreme that, when I go down,

almost every dive I vomit into my regulator

because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head.

And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over.

I get to hand my camera to my assistant,

and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, "Woo. Woo. Woo."

Which means, "Take my camera."

And he thinks I'm saying, "Take my picture."

So we had this little communication breakdown.

(Laughter)

But it's worth it.

I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales,

and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today,

but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made.

I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw,

and I looked up under the underside of the ice,

and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo.

I got very nervous -- no rope, no safety line,

the whole world is moving around me --

and I thought, "I'm in trouble."

But what happened is that the entire underside

was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods

moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice,

giving birth and living out their entire life cycle.

This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here.

And when you have low productivity in this, in ice,

the productivity in copepods go down.

This is a bowhead whale.

Supposedly, science is stating

that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now.

This very whale right here could be over 250 years old.

This whale could have been born

around the start of the Industrial Revolution.

It could have survived 150 years of whaling.

And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North

because of the lives that we're leading in the South.

Narwhals, these majestic narwhals

with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here;

they could be out on the open water.

But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes

where they can breathe, catch a breath,

because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod.

And the cod are there

because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods.

Alright, my favorite part.

When I'm on my deathbed,

I'm going to remember one story more than any other.

Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful,

I don't think I'll ever have another experience

like I did with these leopard seals.

Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation.

They've got that wryly smile on their mouth.

They've got those black sinister eyes

and those spots on their body.

They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary.

And tragically in [2003],

a scientist was taken down and drowned,

and she was being consumed by a leopard seal.

And people were like, "We knew they were vicious. We knew they were."

And so people love to form their opinions.

And that's when I got a story idea:

I want to go to Antarctica,

get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can

and give them a fair shake --

find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood.