The Mummified Polar Bear

News travels in unusual ways in the Arctic. On Clavering Island, we were tipped off by a group of expedition kayakers who told us about the remains of a dead polar bear nearby. It’s not every day you hear about a polar bear carcass, so on one of our sampling days we sailed over to investigate.

What we found was less a carcass and more a ghost. The bear had clearly been dead for months, at least since the winter. In the dry, freezing Arctic air its body hadn’t decomposed in the usual sense, it had been mummified. The skin was tough, like leather, stretched over bones. Half the fur was gone, the rest patchy, clinging to the hide. There was no flesh left, no organs, just emptiness where once there had been life. Maggots had long since done their work, but their casings still lay scattered around.

Up close, the bear looked young. Its teeth were clean and white, its size smaller than a fully grown adult. Examining the skeleton, we noticed a fractured femur. My guess is that it fell, perhaps from a cliff or onto ice and the injury proved fatal in a landscape where survival depends on constant movement.

For researchers at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, finding a naturally dead polar bear is rare. Most of the specimens they study come from bears that have been shot, so a carcass like this offers a different kind of insight. They had asked us, while we were in the region, to collect samples if possible.

That’s how an ordinary Thursday of sampling water and installing instruments suddenly turned into something else entirely: carefully collecting a polar bear cadaver, cutting off its head, and later dissecting and cleaning the cranium to recover what was needed. Fieldwork is like that. One moment you’re adjusting a winch or checking salinity readings, the next you’re elbow-deep in something you never expected to be doing when you woke up that morning.

The work was not straightforward. In the field, extracting what we needed was nearly impossible. So with some effort, we removed the head and brought it back to the lab. There, under more-controlled conditions, we could collect the requested material: fur, a piece of tissue from the tongue, and a back tooth, which can be used to determine the bear’s age.

It was a sobering task. Field science often involves improvisation, grit, and practical problem-solving, but sometimes it also brings you face to face with the stark realities of life and death in the Arctic. The mummified bear on Clavering Island was a reminder of both; a scientific opportunity, and at the same time, a haunting glimpse into the harshness of this environment.