Fascinating! Thanks!
It’ll end badly because life…will…err…find a way
Wasn’t Bi-polar Bear a super hero on “The Tick”?
“This is a job for Bi-Polar Bear!!! if i could only get out of bed.”
Q: What’s a polar bear?
A: A rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
I wonder if a) the Antarctic winter is too rough for a Polar Bear, and b) there is enough habitable coast to keep up a population. From a bear’s point of view, the Arctic is basically all coast, straight through the pole, but Antarctica is mostly barren, uninhabitable (by pretty much anything) ice on top of rock, far from an ocean.
In the short term, though, I imagine the penguin population would be devestated. I wouldn’t worry about a penguin at sea – bears can swim, but they’re not really good at catching things in the water, especially compared to a leopard seal-- but on land they seem like walking, or waddling, bear snacks.
Plus, if the bears don’t know how to catch the penguins, the seals would be more than willing to teach them.
Banned by whom? Not all of Antarctica is claimed by a country, and those claims which exist aren’t universally recognized. There are some international treaties concerning Antarctica, but again, not all countries are signatories. I’m not aware of any police or military force on Antarctica that would be in a position to enforce such a ban.
I initially read the thread title as "How would polar bears fart in the antarctic?
Hmm…is it so cold that the farts would drop to the ice making little clinking sounds? And would this limit the effect on global warming?
I don’t think it would freeze, but the wind would come out counterclockwise.
They’ve resisted creating one, out of concern that it might turn feral and attack the bird population.
They are banned according to the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (1991).
Actually, the primary reason was to prevent canine distemper from infecting the seal populations, although concerns about their impacts on other wildlife no doubt played a part.
Forty-six countries (not just those with territorial claims) are signatories to the Antarctic treaties (although I am not certainly that every one is a party to the Environmental Protocol). While there is probably no formal mechanism to enforce the ban, most countries with any capability to establish a base in Antarctica are signatories and could enforce the ban on their own nationals. Any country that was not a signatory would no doubt be subjected to international pressure not to violate the ban.
There’s probably enough land on the Antarctic Peninsula to support a significant bear population, at least until they had wiped out the bird colonies.
Huh. That’s actually a really, really grim view of the movie - what if the crashed spaceship was just a fluke, and the Thing had actually been assimilating humanity for years before the events of the film, with no one the wiser? Perhaps the characters in the movie aren’t the first humans to fight it, but very nearly the last. They can’t save the world, because unbeknownst to them, the world is already long since lost. Nothing at all they do can mitigate the horror even the slightest bit.
One problem would be the bacteria in the polar bears’ guts, which are not native to the area. Bears die, bodies rot, can the bacteria survive? And what would they do to the local penguin, seal, and fish populations?
Works better if you call it an X-Y bear, instead of rectangular. I LOLed, anyway.
are people implying that the great auk extinction never happened?
What did you draw that conclusion from? :dubious: