Photo of the week: a polar bear on the drift ice north of Svalbard

There is nothing in this photograph but ice, water and a bear, and that is the point. The animal walks towards us across broken floes, head low, its reflection fractured in the dark lead of open water. The light is flat and silver, the kind that the drift ice north of Svalbard produces for weeks on end in summer. What remains is movement and intent.

“This male Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) just had a fiasco when chasing a bearded seal. Subsequently he was restlessly searching for another prey; jumping from one ice floe to another.”

Andreas Weith, file description on Wikimedia Commons

Knowing that changes the picture. The bear is not wandering; he has just failed, and he is working. The photograph was taken on 31 July 2015, according to its file data, on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a Tamron 150–600 mm zoom at 600 mm, at 1/2000 s, f/10 and ISO 500: a fast shutter to hold a moving animal from a moving boat, and a small aperture that keeps the ice sharp from the near floe to the far one.

The Wikimedia Commons community placed the image third in its Picture of the Year 2016 and lists it as a Featured Picture and a Quality Image. We chose it for a simpler reason: it shows a polar bear doing what polar bears do on the ice they depend on, without a hint of staging. Photograph: Andreas Weith, CC BY-SA 4.0.