A step forward for the polar bears
According to a recent survey, the big fluffy icon of the climate disaster is still making do in an environment with little sea ice.
The typical 100 days of frozen seawater around Greenland's southeast coast are now being overtaken by a seascape of glacier-front ice, giving bears year-round access to stable hunting grounds.
It has enabled this genetically unique subgroup to persist in the face of conditions that were predicted to be the death of the species thirty years ago.
“Our findings are hopeful,” said one researcher. “I think they show us how some polar bears might persist under climate change.”
It took Kristian Laidre, the study's principal main author, seven years to monitor the elusive population of several hundred bears as they traveled in southeastern Greenland, which is a very challenging area to study. The team had to rely on survival skills including placing fuel containers inside the snow in the few locations the helicopter could land.
The researchers used "anecdotal reports from subsistence hunters" who occasionally saw the bears and DNA samples to connect the activities of 27 bears to 30 years' worth of prior data.
“They’re an important group because they can help us look into the future,” Laidre told Science Magazine.
On their "slushy mélange" of sea ice and glacier runoff, the female bears seemed smaller and gave birth to fewer cubs, which could be an indication of adaptation or just of sparser foraging opportunities.
This is the first time polar bears have been observed engaging in this behavior when hunting from pieces of freshwater ice, and it provides evidence that bears in regions around the world like Greenland and Svalbard, which have numerous glacier fronts, could still adjust to the new hunting circumstances even under conditions of unpredicted global warming.
Since they reside further south than any other groups, these few hundred polar bears are apparently the most vulnerable to climate change. Thus, the fact that the bears are "finding a way" is indeed positive news.
