From above, the scene looks almost unreal. A white polar bear lies across the back of a dark sperm whale, both drifting in a maze of broken sea ice near 82 degrees north, well beyond usual tourist routes.
Wildlife photographer Roie Galitz captured the moment this summer near Svalbard in Norway after his icebreaker spent a full day pushing through floes to reach the carcass.
A whale far from home
Sperm whales usually favor deeper, milder oceans and tend to stay away from dense Arctic pack ice. Around Svalbard they are typically recorded on the western side of the archipelago, not so far into the high Arctic. Scientists contacted by Galitz described the carcass at that latitude as highly unusual and suggested that currents and wind likely carried the dead whale north into the ice.
By the time the boat arrived, a male polar bear was already resting near the floating giant. Later a female joined, clambering up, sliding off, and working her jaws across the thick hide as she tried to break through to the rich blubber.
In the drone photos that spread online, the bear looks tiny beside a whale estimated at about forty tons, even though the predator herself may weigh around three hundred kilograms. For the bears this was not a picturesque moment. It was dinner.
Why a single carcass matters so much
For a hungry polar bear, stumbling on a dead whale is a little like a family discovering a warehouse full of groceries just as the fridge at home goes empty. A study that estimated the energy content of stranded whales found that a single bowhead carcass can provide as many calories as more than one thousand adult ringed seals, the main prey for many polar bears.
Research led by marine biologist Kristin Laidre suggests that during past warm periods, when summer sea ice retreated and seal hunting became harder, scavenging on stranded large whales probably helped polar bears survive.
Bears could gorge on fat when a carcass appeared, then live off those reserves through long stretches with little access to seals.
That sounds comforting at first. If warming continues, could whales bail the bears out again. The same work offers a sobering answer. Commercial whaling dramatically reduced many great whale populations, and coastal development, industry, and ship traffic can make modern carcasses harder for bears to reach.
In other words, there are fewer massive bodies drifting into shallow waters or onto beaches than there once were.
At the same time, the sea ice that supports everyday hunting is vanishing. Satellite records show that the area of Arctic sea ice at its late summer minimum has shrunk by roughly twelve to thirteen percent per decade compared with the 1980s, with recent years among the lowest ever recorded. For a bear that needs hours on solid ice near seal breathing holes, a stranded whale is a welcome bonus, not a long-term survival plan.
A beautiful image, a fragile safety net
Galitz and his guests stayed with the carcass for about a day, watching the bears drink fresh meltwater, roll on their backs, and test the softening surface while gases from decomposition turned the whale into something like a giant air cushion.
Within days, colleagues reported that shifting winds had pushed the body away into the pack ice, and on a later voyage Galitz confirmed that the scene had vanished. Here one day, gone the next.
When the overhead shot first appeared online, some viewers were convinced it had been generated by artificial intelligence. Galitz responded by pointing to thousands of additional frames and raw files from the encounter.
That skepticism will sound familiar to anyone who scrolls past dramatic climate stories between work emails and checking the electric bill. Yet moments like this are real, and they capture the stark arithmetic of Arctic life more clearly than a graph.
For one female bear, the sperm whale near Svalbard may have meant the difference between gaining enough fat to breed next year and barely scraping through the season.
For polar bears as a whole, however, scientists warn that scattered whale carcasses cannot compensate for rapid, widespread sea ice loss driven by a warming climate. A lost whale can still be a lifeline for a few individuals, but it is not a rescue plan for the species.
The article that first documented this encounter was published on the National Geographic site.
Photographs and video by Roie Galitz.
