Table of Contents
A Russian photographer has captured a fascinating sequence of photographs showing polar bears that have taken more than the deserted buildings of a meteorological station on an island among Russia and Alaska.
In September 2021, photographer Dmitry Kokh traveled by islands in the Chukchi Sea, a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean that sits among Russia and Alaska.
“Being the farthest and most Japanese section of Russian Arctic, this location is really really hard to get but also tough to overlook,” Kokh writes. “We traveled by the sailing yacht alongside the coast and coated much more than 1,200 miles of untouched landscapes, villages lost in time, spots with several fauna and seas total of daily life.”
When-in-a-Lifetime Photographs of Polar Bears
Kokh was on a individual mission to photograph polar bears, and his expedition initially concentrated on Wrangel Island, which is world-well known for remaining a location to come across the bears. In 2021, having said that, possibly owing to the quite cold summer, the island was devoid of its common polar bear population.
“But nature often sending you a little something when you the very least be expecting it — when we handed by way of the Kolyuchin Island in the vicinity of the Northern coastline of Chukotka, we noticed some actions in the windows of the deserted home windows there,” Kokh states. “And when we bought near — those were bears!”
The photographer suggests that polar bears have never been noticed in the abandoned properties of the temperature station on the island, which was created in the 1930s and deserted in the early 1990s. He calls the come across a “once-in-a-lifetime situation” that he was equipped to seize with “technology and a small bit of magic,” in accordance to DIYPhotography.
Kokh managed to capture close-up pictures of the polar bears roaming inside of and outside the house the operate-down structures. Some of the bears would casually look out the windows at the photographer when they discovered him close to.
Kolyuchin Island: A Now-Deserted Polar Bear Playground
Kolyuchin Island is located just 6.8 miles (11km) north of Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula, and the small tundra-coated island actions 2.8 miles (4.5km) in duration with a greatest width of just .93 miles (1.5km).
“[A]bout nine months a calendar year the sea about the island is covered with ice,” Russia Beyond writes. “There are no household settlements on Kolyuchin Island (despite the fact that archeologists recognized that these sites were being inhabited 1,500 years ago).
“In 1934, Soviet scientists crafted a polar station of the Northern Sea Route in this article. It functioned until finally 1992, when it was closed. The island was then deserted.”
Just one of Kokh’s shots from his series, which exhibits a polar bear leaning out of a damaged window, gained the prize for “Best Impression of Wildlife in an Anthropogenic Environment” in a 2021 Russian pictures contest structured by Countrywide Geographic.
It appears to be the polar bears on the island are now satisfied to have the land and abandoned settlements entirely to them selves.
You can discover far more of the photographer’s do the job on his web page and Instagram.
Image credits: Photographs by Dmitry Kokh
