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All but a few populations of polar bears found in the high Arctic could be extinct by 2100 due to the drastic loss of sea ice across their range, according to a study in the Journal Nature Climate Change published Monday. There are 19 distinct subpopulations of polar bears across the Arctic from Alaska to Siberia and all but one face being wiped out due to the loss of sea ice. Without ice, polar bears must survive on land, long distances from their food supplies, causing them to go hungry. Ironically, the Interior Department in its study of the environmental impacts of drilling in the U.S. Arctic found that it would not harm polar bears, which are already forced to build their winter dens and birth their cubs on land instead of ice.
The New York Times reported that the lead author of the study, Peter K. Molnar, a researcher at the University of Toronto Scarborough, painted a grim picture, saying: “There is very little chance that polar bears would persist anywhere in the world, except perhaps in the very high Arctic in one small subpopulation” if globally we remain on the current trajectory for greenhouse-gas emissions. The best estimate is that there are only about 25,000 remaining polar bears in the Arctic. Their main habitat is sea ice, but because of the rapidly increasing warming in the region, the amount of summer ice has declined by roughly 13 percent per decade compared to the 1981-2010 average. The researchers looked at climate models and ice-free days projections and assumed that the warming would continue in the business as usual path. They found that for most polar bear subgroups, because of the loss of sea ice the bears would not be able to find enough food and thus starve.
Federal scientists doing routine sturgeon population survey work in the Detroit River last week got a HUGE surprise when they encountered a 7 foot long, 100-year-old female sturgeon. More than half a million sturgeon lived in the Detroit River in the 19th century, NPR reported. Now there are believed to be only about 7,000 because […]
On Thursday, the Biden administration proposed a new rule that would reverse the Trump administration’s weakening of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The act was weakened in 2020, allowing industrial operations and individuals to unintentionally kill many birds without accountability.
Why This Matters: The world is facing a biodiversity crisis, losing more species each year than ever before.
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