The Arctic sea Ice is melting & it's affecting polar bears
In the Arctic
Due to climate change and human activities, the polar bears in the Arctic could possibly face extinction because of the shrinking sea ice. The melting ice is affecting the polar bears’ behavior and physical condition. The more the ice melts the more the polar bears have to travel and the less food/ seals they can catch which causes them to be skinnier and weaker.
Sea ice melting.
Polar Bear Dying From Global Warming
Where the polar bears are located.
Almost all of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, such as the Beaufort Sea off Alaska to the Siberian Arctic, would face being swept out because the melting of sea ice would make the animals onto land and away from their food supplies for longer periods. Longer fasting, and less nursing of cubs by mothers would lead to fast declines in reproduction and survival. Which could make polar bears extinct.
Approxiemently there are about 25,000 polar bears in the Arctic. The polar bears mainly spend time on the sea ice so they can hunt seals by waiting for them to surface at the holes in the ice.The Polar bears need sea ice to capture their food. Arctic sea ice grows in the winter and melts and retreats in spring and summer. Recently the region has warmed quickly in recent decades, The ice extent in summer has decreased roughly 13 percent per decade compared to the 1981-2010 average.
In September 1979, there were 2.7 million square miles of sea ice in the Arctic. By September 2021, there were 1.8 million square miles — somewhat two-thirds of what covered the Arctic in 1979. In the summertime, polar bears go out on the ice to hunt and eat, feasting and putting on weight to sustain them through the winter. But the more the ice shrinks the more they can't get food and get weaker and smaller.
From 1996 to 2006, higher temperatures interfered with the number of months that sea ice was accessible in the summer, resulting in habitat loss for bears. In Baffin Bay, the number of days in summer with no sea ice has risen by more than 12 days per decade from 1979 to 2014. That means less hunting habitat for the polar bears. which causes them to die. Studies show that the habitat range dropped 70% in the summer there since the 1990s.
The drastic change in sea ice slows the length of time that polar bears have to hunt seals on the ice The main feeding time for polar bears is in the late spring and beginning of summer when seals are giving birth and weaning their pups and the worry is that sooner the ice breakup it will reduce the amount of time polar bears have to catch seals during this time.
