Environment Forum

Coke’s new look: polar-bear white

Coca-Cola has one of the most recognizable brands on the planet: the red can with the white letters. World Wildlife Fund has an equally eye-catching logo: a black-and-white panda. This week, the two are joining forces to change the Coke can’s look from red to white. It’s meant to raise awareness and money to find a safe haven for polar bears, listed as a threatened species because their icy Arctic habitat is melting under their paws due to climate change.

In a project called Arctic Home, Coke plans to turn 1.4 billion of its soft-drink cans white for the first time in its history, replacing the familiar red with an image of a mother polar bear and two cubs making their way across the Arctic. There will also be white bottle caps on other drinks the company sells. The new look is to show up on store shelves from November 1 through February 2012.

The whole point is to raise money to protect a far-north area where summer sea ice will probably persist the longest, WWF and Coke said in a statement. The Arctic Home plan is to work with local residents to manage as much as 500,000 square miles of territory to provide a home for polar bears.

Coke and polar bears are something of a classic combination, according to the company’s Katie Bayne, who said in a statement that the big white bears were first introduced in the beverage-maker’s advertising in 1922. But the color change is more than tin-deep. Coca-Cola is making an initial $2 million donation to World Wildlife Fund to support polar bear conservation work. Those who buy the white cans can text the package code to 357357 to make individual donations of $1, or donate online at ArcticHome.com. The company plans to match all donations made with a package code by March 15 up to $1 million.

“Polar bears inspire the imagination,” Carter Roberts, CEO and president of WWF, said in a statement. “They’re massive, powerful, beautiful and they live nowhere else except the Arctic. Their lives are intimately bound up with sea ice, which is now melting at an alarming rate. By working with Coca-Cola, we can raise the profile of polar bears and what they’re facing, and most importantly, engage people to work with us, to help protect their home.”

Photo credits: REUTERS/Geoff York/World Wildlife Fund (World Wildlife Fund photograph taken along the western shore of Hudson Bay in November 2010 shows a female polar bear with two cubs near Churchill, Canada, in this image released to Reuters on February 9, 2011.

New Coke cans (World Wildlife Fund/Coca-Cola)

Suspected smuggler of rare Sumatran tigers arrested in Indonesia

Indonesian wildlife officials have arrested a suspected smuggler of critically endangered Sumatran tigers after a two-day stakeout, World Wildlife Fund reports. There are believed to be fewer than 400 of these rare big cats in the wild.

The arrest was made by Indonesia’s Natural Resource Conservation Agency in Riau and West Sumatra provinces, with support from World Wildlife Fund-Indonesia’s Tiger Protection Units. The authorities also seized the skin of a Sumatran tiger they believed was poisoned.

After hearing of the poisoned tiger, the authorities staked out a poacher, which they believe led to a high-level wildlife smuggler, WWF said in a statement.

When they arrived at the suspected smuggler’s house, investigators located the tiger skin by following the smell of chemicals used to preserve animal parts. The tiger’s bones, valued on the black market for their supposed medicinal value, were not found. They did find a live python, parts of a Southern Serow (a kind of mountain goat) and a muntjac, or barking deer.

Authorities tracked a vehicle they suspected of picking up the skin and bones from the poached Sumatran tiger to Balung, a border area between Riau and West Sumatra. The driver of the vehicle was then seen handing over the tiger skin to the suspect, who is in police custody in West Sumatra.

“It’s hard to say how big a trader he is,” Barney Long, WWF’s manager of Asian species conservation programs,” said by telephone. “We’ve been gathering information on him for the last few years … He’s clearly a major trader of wildlife and we know he’s trading tigers.”

Tigers are primarily hunted for their bones, which are used in traditional Asian medicines and in a tonic wine, especially in Vietnam and China, Long said. Tiger whiskers are thought to have magical properties in some areas, while small pieces of tiger skin are sometimes considered to be good luck charms, imparting strength.

Greenland ice melt sets a record — and could set the stage for sea level rise

Greenland’s ice sheet melted at a record rate in 2010, and this could be a major contributor to sea level rise in coming decades.

The ice in Greenland melted so much last year that it formed rivers and lakes on top of the vast series of glaciers that covers much of the big Arctic island, with waterfalls flowing through cracks and holes toward the bottom of the ice sheet. Take a look at video from Marco Tedesco of City College of New York, who is leading a project to study what factors affect ice sheet melting. The photo at left shows a camp by the side of a stream flowing from a lake — all of it on top of the ice sheet.

“This past melt season was exceptional, with melting in some areas stretching up to 50 days longer than average,” Tedesco said in a statement.  “Melting in 2010 started exceptionally early at the end of April and ended quite late in mid- September.”

Summer 2010 temperatures in Greenland were up to 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C) above average, and there was reduced snowfall, Tedesco and his co-authors noted in an article in the current edition of Environmental Research Letters. Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, had the warmest spring and summer since records began there in 1873. Average summer temperatures vary widely, but in coastal areas hover around freezing.

This is in tune with studies released in the last week by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the World Meteorological Organization finding 2010 was tied with 2005 and 1998 for the warmest year since modern global temperature record-keeping began in 1880.

With less snow cover, more bare ice was exposed to the sun, and because bare ice is darker than snow, it absorbs more solar radiation. So the more ice is uncovered, the more warming sunlight it absorbs and the more vulnerable it is to melting. Tedesco said other factors being examined include the impacts of lakes on the glacial surface, dust and soot deposited over the ice sheet.

The study was sponsored by World Wildlife Fund, NASA and the National Science Foundation.

10,000 walruses, ready for their close-up

Zoom! Pan! Swish!  Take a look at a new movie of walruses crowding an Alaska beach — as you’ve never seen them before! Shot from 4,000 feet up in the air, the vast herd of walruses looks like a pile of brown gravel from a distance. (A far different view than the extreme close-up in the still photo at left, which was taken at a zoo in Belarus.)

As the camera in Alaska zooms in, you can see there are thousands of walruses scrambling ashore as the ice floes they normally use as hunting platforms melt away. The video was shot this month at Point Lay, Alaska, and distributed this week by the U.S. Geological Survey. It’s impossible to say how many are on this beach in this movie, but an Arctic scientist at World Wildlife Fund estimates between 10,000 and 20,000 of the tusked marine mammals have hauled themselves onto land in Alaska this year as summer Arctic sea ice shrank to its third-smallest recorded size.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Stringer Vladimir Nikolsky (Zoo employee plays with a walrus during celebrations marking the zoo’s 23th birthday in Minsk, Belarus, August 11, 2007)

Video credit: U.S. Geological Survey