Hidden behind year-round blizzards and a month-long polar night, Wrangel Island lies just a few nautical miles from the Arctic pack ice limit. It is the last untouched natural paradise northwest of the Bering Strait. At winter temperatures as low as - 40 °C, more than 1000 polar bears, musk oxen and reindeer live alongside walrus colonies, seal families, arctic foxes, wolves and countless smaller endemic animal and plant species on a 7,608 km² Noah's Ark from the last ice age. Fossil finds prove that on Wrangel Island the mammoth grazed in the Arctic tundra until almost 3500 years ago. More recently, Russians, Britons, Canadians and Americans took turns occupying the island. Finally, on August 8, 1926, Soviet troops established the settlement "Ushakovskoe" on the south coast of the island, where almost 100 fishermen, seals and whalers lived until the end of the Soviet Union. Today the island serves as a base for a handful of gamekeepers of the "Wrangel Biosphere Reserve". It was not until the "Iron Curtain" lifted at the eastern end of the world that a few polar explorers, biologists and zoologists accompanied by Russians were allowed to visit the almost untouched paradise in the Chukshen Sea 600 km beyond the Arctic Circle. In 2004, UNESCO declared the area around Wrangel Island a World Heritage Site. Today the island is considered the last completely untouched biotope for polar bears, here they get their young and have no natural enemies. But the times in which the polar bar was only confronted with the challenges of its ecosystem are long gone. Global warming is making life difficult for the most powerful predator in the North and seriously threatening its habitat.
