Florian featured on WWF Website

One of Florians arctic images was published in the summer issue of the WWF magazine and online on their website.  It shows a walrus surfacing for air after a long dive. Barents Sea, Norway. The image was photographed on one of Florians and Emils many expeditions to the Arctic for their coffeetable book "To the Arctic".

Excerpt from the WWF-article: In what has become the new normal over the past 10 years, residents of the Inupiat village of Point Lay on the coast of the Chukchi Sea in Alaska have had new neighbors each fall. Tens of thousands of walrus, primarily females and calves, have gathered on beaches near the village. “In 2009, there were 50,000 animals at Point Lay,” remembers US Fish and Wildlife biologist Joel Garlich-Miller. “The haulout expanded for several miles along the beach.”



As the climate changes, walrus habitat is rapidly changing, too. Traditionally, female walrus and their young spend the summer on floating sea ice, resting on ice between dives to feed on clams, snails, and marine worms in the offshore shallow waters of the Chukchi Sea. But as summer sea ice moves north to waters too deep for the animals to feed in, walrus abandon the ice and come ashore. The haulouts were first observed in 2007, and coincided with a record sea ice melt in the Arctic. Over the past decade, the number of walrus hauling out along the Chukchi Sea has increased dramatically, both in Alaska and Russia.
  copyright WWF - Isabelle Groc. To read the full article please visit the WWF-Website.