Vancouver Aquarium president Dr. John Nightingale and 32 other guests and researchers will undertake a trip to the arctic in order to understand the conservation issues affecting the marine life in the North, including whales, walruses and polar bears.

The group has boarded the chartered ship Akademik Ioffe and will sail through the icy waters of the Inuits' Nunavut region. Nightingale and his crew are attempting to learn more about and understand the changing conditions of sea life in the Arctic North. He has arranged with the Vancouver Sun to keep a running log of their journey.

In the first entry, Nightingale outlines what the group hopes to accomplish during their journey, which is to not only study the environmental changes but learn about the other factors threatening the well-being of polar bears and other creatures.

"Yet, perhaps more than anywhere else, the environmental issues in the Arctic are inextricably linked to social, cultural, political and economic change; and while polar bears and sea ice are indeed part of the Arctic’s stories of change, our goal over the next few weeks is to broaden our understanding of what a changing Arctic means - to those who live and work in the Baffin region, the wildlife upon which they depend, as well as the rest of us who, whether we realize it or not both affect and are affected by the changing Arctic," he writes.

Travelers may want to book a polar bear cruise of their own in order to see these tremendous creatures, who are perhaps most severely affected by climate change.