DA = David Attenborough

DA: Winter in the Arctic. The northern lights flicker across the sky. It's a land of continuous night, where temperatures plummet to minus 40.

Polar bears are in their element, hunting for seals on the frozen sea.

But the long night is coming to an end. In February, the sun rises for the first time in four months.

In the coming weeks the strength of the sun will power an enormous change, but for now its rays offer only a little warmth.

At the height of summer, even the permanent ice caps are touched by the power of the sun.

As July draws on, the great melt reaches its peak.

The greatest seasonal change on the planet has taken place.

The sea ice that once extended all the way to the horizon is now open ocean.

In just three months the sun has won its battle with the ice.

Over seven million square kilometres of ice has melted away, uncovering thousands of islands surrounded by open ocean. But in recent years the scale of this melt has been growing. And for one animal, this is a critical issue.

A mother bear and her adolescent cub rest on a fragment of sea ice. With the melt, they're forced to swim ever greater distances to hunt for seals.

Their Arctic home is increasingly vulnerable to a changing climate, and this year there has been even less ice than normal.

If future melts are as extreme as this one, bears like these may starve or drown, lost at sea.

This is one of the last pieces of ice now adrift in the open ocean. The polar bear's icy world has melted away.

Intermediate Unit 10 DVD Script

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