Lone arctic polar bear on floating ice while everything around him melts! Sad global warming design meant to illustrate mankind's acceleration of global warming. 'You Explain it to him.' Polar bears are a potentially threatened species living in the circumpolar north. They are animals which know no boundaries. They pad across the ice from Russia to Alaska, from Canada to Greenland and onto Norway's Svalbard archipelago. No adequate census exists on which to base a worldwide population estimate, but biologists use a working figure of 20,000 to 25,000 bears with about sixty percent of those living in Canada.