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The great polar bear: Powerful, fearsome…but helpless in the face of global warming...
They prefer to live solitary lives out on the ice pack, in temperatures that reach dozens of degrees below freezing. Polar bears—who have the same body temperature as humans—can swim miles in the Arctic ocean with their heads pushing aside slushy ice, then lay for hours in the snow watching and sniffing for a seal to poke its nose into an air hole. Polar bears in the Hudson Bay region of Canada hibernate without eating for up to eight months at a time and hunt only in the winter. It's hard to imagine that such a powerful predator is helpless at the hands of something as common as the everyday pollution that comes out of our cars and power plants. The polar bear can be found on the islands and coasts of the five nations that ring the Arctic Circle—the U.S., Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway. The estimated polar bear population is about 20,000, but real data is difficult to get due to the remote expanse of the bear's habitat. What we do know is that polar bears are highly dependent on sea ice for hunting ringed seals. Warming temperatures from global warming threaten to cause sea ice to recede, making it nearly impossible for polar bears to hunt. According to the Canadian Wildlife Services, the Hudson Bay population of polar bears is already watching its sea ice hunting grounds melt three weeks earlier than it did in the mid-1970s. As a result, the bears have to migrate further inland before they can come back out on the ice in the winter. For a polar bear that fasts each year for six to eight months, those extra three weeks can mean the difference between starving and living. Nursing polar bear cubs have a much lower chance of making it through their first year. In fact, scientists have already found a 15 percent drop in birth rates among Hudson Bay's polar bears. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the United Nations to determine the impact of global warming, has found that the Arctic is likely the most vulnerable place on the planet to global warming impacts. The severity of changes to habitat and impacts on wildlife that we are seeing in the Arctic now are an early warning of the impacts that other wildlife face. Arctic and Antarctic species such as walrus, seals and penguins may soon find themselves in the same precarious situation as the polar bear. And wildlife in all corners of the planet—deserts, mountain ranges, and coastal regions—face similar threats due to global warming. Up to Top |
It is no wonder that the polar bear is one of the world's most fearsome predators. These powerful carnivores have been filmed killing and hauling beluga whales that weigh several tons out of the water for a meal. Their only enemies are humans.