The Great Polar Bear Feast Kaktovik, Alaska, is a small Inupiat hunting community. Perched on the edge of the world, it's inaccessible by road and locked in by frozen sea ice for 9 months of the year. But for the month of September, it becomes the center of polar bear studies as scientists and wildlife photographers flock to the tiny town to observe the bears' unusual behavior.
With more and more polar bears turning up year on year, scientists are determined to find out why this is happening. How do the bears know to come to this remote island and at exactly this time of year? And what is happening to the polar bears of the South Beaufort Sea that is seeing so many of them desert the ice for land?
We also witness what happens to the inhabitants of Kaktovik when the whale bones are picked bare, and the huge group of polar bears heads for the town.
The film has extraordinary access to the work of scientist Todd Atwood, the lead polar bear scientist for the US Geological Survey. He has estimated that there has been a 40% decline in the polar bears around the South Beaufort Sea since 2006. It is an extraordinary decline, and he is determined to find out why.
And as the search for untapped fossil fuels and climate change poses fundamental threats to life on Earth, how will the polar bear, the iconic image of the melting Artic, adapt to this new world?
Due to limited US rights, this product is not available for shipping to Canada.
Producer: Livia Simoka, Jo Young, Alan Hayling
Production Company: Channel 4; Renegade Pictures
Production Year: 2016
Copyright Year: 2015
Director: Andrew Graham Brown, Nick Clarke Powell
Narrator: Eric Meyers
Discs: 1
Subtitles: Y
Subtitle Language: English
Audio Format: Stereo
Aspect Ratio: 16x9 Widescreen