The way that these polar bears hunt using freshwater ice “might buy bears in that area a little bit more time, as pack ice continues to decline...”
A female bear and two 1-year-old cubs walk over snow-covered freshwater glacier ice in Southeast Greenland.
Climate change is making sea ice more and more scarce. Loss of sea ice is “the primary threat to polar bears,” saysof the University of Washington, the lead author of the new study. But, she says, this new work suggests some bears might be able to cope with a diminished amount of sea ice — at least for awhile — in places where they can take advantage of floating glacier ice, like Greenland and Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
To see what they could find in the southeast, the team had to take helicopters from the nearest settlement and fly for two hours in a straight line to the coast. “We arrived in these fjords, very isolated fjords, and there’s essentially no sea ice or very poor sea ice off shore,” says Laidre, explaining that the researchers expected to find few bears.
That may be because these bears are homebodies. All of the tracked bears pretty much stayed in their home fjord or fjords. Occasionally, the bears got caught by a fast sea current that rips down the coast towards southern tip of Greenland, says Laidre, but the bears would quickly swim to shore. “And then they would walk home over the ice sheet to get back to their fjord.”Todd Atwood
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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