In unbearably cold weather, who better to lead her little ones to safety than a devoted polar bear mum?
The protective parent showed her cubs the way after a -30°C snowstorm inside the Arctic Circle left them heading for cover on Canada’s remote Baffin Island.
The snap is among a collection of jaw-dropping pictures captured by wildlife photographer Paul Goldstein. It was taken in a landscape where ice caps are melting rapidly due to climate change.
British snapper Paul said: “Photographing polar bears is a real quest, as searching for a distant ivory blob on a white canvas is challenging.
“But actually finding them on a grounded iceberg in -30°C weather is deeply rewarding. The ice is vanishing – and fast.
“Even in the last 20 years I have seen glaciers retreat more than a kilometre.”
Globetrotting Paul, a conservationist and tour guide for Exodus Travels, also captured an Arctic fox in its natural habitat and humpback whales and a trio of chinstrap penguins in the Antarctic.
He added: “Scenes like these make me feel privileged to be in the incredibly remote parts of what is becoming an increasingly fragile globe.
“The chinstrap penguins are, like us, just trying to put some food on the table for their young.
“They have to swim up to 80 kilometres offshore each day to get the shrimp, fish, squid and krill they need to survive.”
Paul has also captured the Northern Lights above a frozen fjord in Buksnesfjord, in northern Norway.
That’s around 2,000 miles from Paul’s base back home in Wimbledon, south-west London.
It’s one heck of a journey to get there.
But of course, he made Light work of it.
