Yuzhny Island is a chilly sort of a place. It’s off the north eastern coast of Russia in the Barents Sea. It’s home to a few thousand people, mainly concentrated in the administrative city of Belushya Guba (named after the Beluga Whales that hang around those oceans) who mainly work in the nuclear testing facilities on the island.
Except now they have some difficult new residents: polar bears.
Polar bears get dangerously close to residential buildings in Russia https://t.co/p53pB7FzpG
— Dr.Annamaria.Grabow (@StopIllatosut) February 10, 2019
Polar bears are an accepted risk of living in the Arctic, but sightings have recently jumped from five or six to around fifty who are, reportedly, attacking people and entering buildings and requiring a state of emergency to be called.
“The emergency situation was caused by the mass invasion of polar bears in residential areas,” the Archangelsk governor said in a statement. “Residents, schools and kindergartens are submitting numerous oral and written complaints demanding to ensure safety in the settlement. The people are scared. They are frightened to leave homes and their daily routines are broken.”
And why are they there? Climate change. Specifically, that the pack ice where polar bears hunt seals has been vanishing, which has forced the animals to look for food on land.
Did… did they deploy the Predator?
The bears are endangered, which means killing them is out of the question. So obviously the only thing to do is to accept defeat and surrender the city to them.
Of course, given the area’s facilities, it’s possible that the bears have had just about enough of humanity’s planet-warming shenanigans and have decided to take matters into their own paws.
After all, maybe a few nations would be a bit more assiduous about hitting their Paris Agreement targets if non-compliance meant the risk of nuclear bear retaliation.
Which is also the name of our new metal band.