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"For the past 25 years, the Discovery Channel's Shark Week has gotten viewers excited about the creatures that rule the sea during its annual broadcast each summer. Now, non-profit media organization Explore.org is hoping to create a new yearly celebration of the great outdoors \u2014 this one, focusing on polar bears.\nThough Polar Bear Week doesn't have Shark Week's 25-year history, it does have one big advantage starting off: social media. Explore.org aims to use new media to rapidly build awareness for the devastating effects climate change is having on the lives of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic, using a live stream.\nExplore.org founder Charles Annenberg Weingarten hopes Polar Bear Week, as well as its other initiatives, can embrace new media and technology to make people across the world fall back in love with the planet and care about these polar bears, whose natural habitats are drastically changing. \n\nSEE ALSO: Panda Live Stream Hopes You\u2019ll Fall in Love With the Planet\n\"Our mantra is 'never stop learning' and with this is mind, we welcome people of all ages and from all over the world, to open their hearts, souls and minds to the world of the polar bear,\" Annenberg Weingarten said. \"The world is changing and this special event represents an incredible opportunity to escape the noise and rhetoric of humanity with the solitude and wisdom of nature.\" \nEach year, polar bears migrate across the Canadian Arctic, though the migration has been pushed back due to polar ice melt caused by global temperature changes. Polar bear migration can only occur when sea ice is formed, so organizers hope the freezing can get the attention of Groundhog Day, except it would mark the coming of winter. \nExplore.org has partnered with Polar Bears International, Frontiers North Adventures and Park Canada to capture and live stream the annual polar bear migration in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, which is known as the polar bear capital of the world. From Nov. 10 through Nov. 16, numerous media companies are joining together to promote the polar bear feeds. Networks including CNN, Animal Planet and National Geographic will show the cams on their websites. BBC World Wide and BBC Natural History will promote the footage highlights.\n\n\nMajor social media forces are behind the Polar Bear Week movement, as well. Twitter has donated promoted tweets, YouTube is featuring the live stream on its homepage Monday and Ustream will give the live stream a couple of hours on its homepage each day.\nThe live coverage, which is streaming from now through the end of November, or whenever the ice freezes and enables the polar bears to move, comes from five cameras producing three feeds: one positioned on top of a roving tundra buggy, another at the tundra buggy lodge and one at Wapusk National Park, which is among the largest maternity dens in the worlds where females give birth. \nThe best hours to watch the live feed are between 10 a.m. and 4:00 pm CT.\nDo you think the social media push will help Polar Bear Week become the next Shark Week? Let us know in the comments if you think this initiative will be successful. \nImage by Katheryn Billing, courtesy of Explore.org\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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