Hunt treaty
1973 agreement
Range states managed harvest before ice became the lead file.
Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Nanook of the North
- Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears
- Churchill tourism scale
- Knut born
- US ESA listing
- Knut dies
- Paris Agreement years
- PBSG status table updates
- Churchill late-ice years
- USGS ice projections
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Speed54
Intelligence73
Range55
Resilience21
Cultural impact67
Ecological role67
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Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
Why is resilience low if some subpopulations look stable?
IUCN VU and the 2008 ESA listing rest on ice-season length. A few stable stocks do not cancel a circumpolar ice forecast. High resilience in this atlas means secure (koi, many owls), not famous.
What did the 2008 US listing change?
It treated greenhouse gases as a listed-species threat. Courts later limited how far that could reach power plants; the biological finding stayed.
Is Churchill typical?
Western Hudson Bay is an early-ice-loss stock and a tourist town. It is a visible subpopulation, not the whole Arctic.
Who was Knut?
A hand-reared Berlin cub (2006-2011) whose fame and death made zoo ethics a tabloid. He is culture, not a sea-ice time series.
Do polar bears eat only seals?
Seals (especially ringed) are the fat that pays. Bird eggs, carrion and land food appear more in long ice-free summers -- a budget problem, not a new niche that replaces ice.
What is Nanook of the North to this file?
The 1922 film staged Inuit life for a southern camera. It is a portrayal, not an ethnography of nanuq knowledge.
IUCN: Vulnerable
The polar bear did not enter English as a finished emblem. Hunts, films, listings and field stations rewrote the animal on a dated clock.
This chapter keeps ten timeline points, five eras and three milestones so a later translation can hold the same years.
Where it began
Pleistocene UrsusCircumpolar Arctic sea ice
Timeline
1922Nanook of the North
Flaherty film that staged Arctic life for southern audiences.
1973Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears
Range-state hunt treaty -- the pre-climate legal layer.
1980sChurchill tourism scale
Tundra buggies made a migration a ticket.
2006Knut born
Berlin Zoo cub that became a global name.
2008US ESA listing
Sea ice named as the primary threat.
2011Knut dies
A zoo death as a media event.
2015Paris Agreement years
Bear-as-climate-icon sat beside a treaty the listing had previewed.
2017PBSG status table updates
Subpopulation-by-subpopulation honesty against a single cartoon decline.
2019Churchill late-ice years
Onshore waiting lengthened; conflict and tourism both rose.
2022USGS ice projections
Model papers still used as the ESA biological backbone.
The eras
Buggy years
Churchill 1980s-
A town sold a migration.
2006-11
Knut media
A zoo cub out-shouted subpopulation tables.
2008-
Climate listing
ESA made ice a legal habitat.
2010s-
Onshore waits
Longer ice-free seasons rewrote conflict and diet notes.
Milestones
1973 agreement
1973A hunt treaty among Arctic states -- rare for a single species.
ESA 2008
2008Climate as a listed threat.
Knut
2006-11Zoo fame as a cultural-impact spike.
Reading polar bear history beside the resilience score keeps a recovered stock from standing in for a threatened cousin.
Keep exploring
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