Two things to keep on your radar for the rest of the week: First, we'll have an update from NOAA on El Niño tomorrow morning. Meteorologist Chris Dolce will cover that on cnn.com/weather. Second, folks in the Plains should keep an eye on severe weather this weekend. SPC is outlooking strong storms into early next week.

In the meantime, Bill is back with an update from his adventure on the MS Freya in the Arctic.

—Angela Fritz, Meteorologist

From Bill Weir, Chief Climate Correspondent, with photos from Julian Quiñones

The MS Freya, a Swedish ship built to navigate the ice and our temporary home in the Arctic. (Julian Quinones/CNN)

I learn that we've reached the ice cap in the most exciting way possible. 

“Yaroslava has spotted a polar bear!” comes the wake-up call and we clamor up to the bridge to find last night’s open ocean replaced by a heaving, shifting parking lot of ice. Truck-sized slabs two feet thick float together, then apart, forming pressure ridges that make the horizon jagged and perfect for hiding bears. 

But once you see the yellowish coat, a polar bear is easy to follow with a long lens. This one is a young male, and we are likely the first humans it has ever seen. Like a chilly version of Darwin’s Voyage of The Beagle, our ice ship provides a precious chance to see adaptation in real time.  

A polar bear's first encounter with a drone. Maybe. (Julian Quiñones/CNN)

There are two kind of polar bears in Svalbard; the homebody “local” bears that stick to land, and “pelagic” roamers that float between Arctic nations on the ice now crunched beneath our hull.  

The sea ice began to melt in unmistakable ways over the last two decades, making the fatty seals that need the ice to breed harder to find for these Arctic carnivores. But much to the delight of biologists, both kinds of bears have held their numbers and weight.

In this version of survival-of-the-fittest, local bears have taken to hunting reindeer, raiding the nests of sea birds and scavenging the occasional walrus carcass. And the more time polar bears spend on land, the higher the chance of human contact, whether out of hunger or curiosity.  

On a health sale of 1 to 5 (5 being fat and happy; 1 being “get back NOW”) our guides rank this young bear a 4. He has no idea that he won the location lottery, born on the edge of a continental shelf, where the upwell of ocean nutrients creates enough abundant life to create a biological sweet spot. For now.  

Top: A herd of walrus keep warm by huddling together. Bottom: Reindeer hoof up a hillside. (Julian Quiñones/CNN)

The ever-thickening blanket of fossil fuel pollution is warming Svalbard seven times faster than the rest of the planet, which puts evolution here on fast forward. Warmer water is bringing new populations of plankton and kelp, and since the reindeer are losing their frozen-fjord routes to tasty lichen, they are forced to graze on less-nutritious seaweed. Shorter, fatter and slower than their Arctic cousins, Svalbard reindeer can feed a few bears in the short term, but they can’t sustain a population forever.  

For now, Svalbard's bears are improvising with happy results. But their struggling food supply is a reminder these bears are lucky and — as with most of their Arctic polar bear brethren — luck can run out. The polar bear population around Hudson Bay, Canada, has crashed by around 50% since the 1980s.

We back out of the pack, wave goodbye to the bear and reflect of the lesson: The effects of climate change vary widely, but are happening faster than anticipated everywhere. And the creatures that adapt to these realities the quickest have the best chance to live.  

Can you spot the polar bear? (Julian Quiñones/CNN)

Geese fly past foggy lower Manhattan at sunrise on May 10. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

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