Polar bear biopsies to shed light on Arctic pollutants
With one foot braced on the helicopter's landing skid, a veterinarian lifted his air rifle, took aim and fired a tranquiliser dart at a polar bear.
The predator bolted but soon slumped into the snowdrifts, its broad frame motionless beneath the Arctic sky.
The dramatic pursuit formed part of a pioneering research mission in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, where scientists, for the first time, took fat tissue biopsies from polar bears to study the impact of pollutants on their health.
The expedition came at a time when the Arctic region was warming at four times the global average, putting mounting pressure on the iconic predators as their sea-ice habitat shrank.
"The idea is to show as accurately as possible how the bears live in the wild -- but in a lab," Laura Pirard, a Belgian toxicologist, told AFP.
"To do this, we take their (fatty) tissue, cut it in very thin slices and expose it to the stresses they face, in other words pollutants and stress hormones," said Pirard, who developed the method.
Moments after the bear collapsed, the chopper circled back and landed. Researchers spilled out, boots crunching on the snow.
One knelt by the bear's flank, cutting thin strips of fatty tissue. Another drew blood.
Each sample was sealed and labelled before the bear was fitted with a satellite collar.
Scientists said that while the study monitors all the bears, only females were tracked with GPS collars as their necks are smaller than their heads -- unlike males, who cannot keep a collar on for more than a few minutes.
- Arctic lab -
For the scientists aboard the Norwegian Polar Institute's research vessel Kronprins Haakon, these fleeting encounters were the culmination of months of planning and decades of Arctic fieldwork.
In a makeshift lab on the icebreaker, samples remained usable for several days, subjected to controlled doses of pollutants and hormones before being frozen for further analysis back on land.
Each tissue fragment gave Pirard and her colleagues insight into the health of an animal that spent much of its life on sea ice.
Analysis of the fat samples showed that the main pollutants present were per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) -- synthetic chemicals used in industry and consumer goods that linger in the environment for decades.
Despite years of exposure, Svalbard's polar bears showed no signs of emaciation or ill health, according to the team.
The local population has remained stable or even increased slightly, unlike parts of Canada, where the Western Hudson Bay group declined by 27 percent between 2016 and 2021, from 842 to 618 bears, according to a government aerial survey.
Other populations in the Canadian Arctic, including the Southern Beaufort Sea, have also shown long-term declines linked to reduced prey access and longer ice-free seasons.
Scientists estimate there are around 300 polar bears in the Svalbard archipelago and roughly 2,000 in the broader region stretching from the North Pole to the Barents Sea.
The team found no direct link between sea ice loss and higher concentrations of pollutants in Svalbard's bears. Instead, differences in pollutant levels came down to the bears' diet.
Two types of bears -- sedentary and pelagic -- feed on different prey, leading to different chemicals building up in their bodies.
- Changing diet -
With reduced sea ice, the bears' diets have already started shifting, researchers said. These behavioural adaptations appeared to help maintain the population's health.
"They still hunt seals but they also take reindeer (and) eggs. They even eat grass (seaweed), even though that has no energy for them," Jon Aars, the head of the Svalbard polar bear programme, told AFP.
"If they have very little sea ice, they necessarily need to be on land," he said, adding that they spend "much more time on land than they used to... 20 or 30 years ago".
This season alone, Aars and his team of marine toxicologists and spatial behaviour experts captured 53 bears, fitted 17 satellite collars, and tracked 10 mothers with cubs or yearlings.
"We had a good season," Aars said.
The team's innovations go beyond biopsies. Last year, they attached small "health log" cylinders to five females, recording their pulse and temperature.
Combined with GPS data, the devices offer a detailed record of how the bears roam, how they rest and what they endure.
Polar bears were once hunted freely across Svalbard but since an international protection agreement in 1976, the population here has slowly recovered.
The team's findings may help explain how the bears' world is changing, and at an alarming rate.
As the light faded and the icebreaker's engines hummed against the vast silence, the team packed away their tools, leaving the Arctic wilderness to its inhabitants.
olm-ef/po/srg/jj/gil
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Scientists make jaw-dropping discovery after satellite images reveal what's hiding over a mile beneath Antarctic ice: 'It's like uncovering a time capsule'
Scientists studying the East Antarctic Ice Sheet discovered a 34-million-year-old river-carved landscape hidden under more than a mile of ice, The Brighter Side of News reported. The concealed world offered a unique glimpse into the history and potential future of the critical ice sheet. "It's like uncovering a time capsule," said Stewart Jamieson of Durham University, the study's lead author, per The Brighter Side of News. The preserved landscape, which existed before the formation of the Antarctic sheet ice, spanned nearly 4 million square miles, providing experts with an unprecedented view into the region's geological history. The team used RADARSAT, a Canadian satellite system, to detect the landscape beneath the ice, per The Brighter Side of News. By studying the preserved landscape, researchers can better understand previous cycles of freezing and melting that can be crucial to predicting how future Antarctic ice melt will unfold. Because the Antarctic ice sheets sit on land rather than floating in water like Arctic ice, their melting would have a dramatic impact on sea levels around the world. According to the University of Texas Institute of Geophysics, the basin where the researchers discovered the hidden landscape contained enough ice to raise sea levels by a catastrophic 25 feet or more. Still, the land under the surface of that crucial ice sheet remained more mysterious to researchers than the surface of Mars. "And that's a problem because the landscape controls the way that ice in Antarctica flows, and it controls the way it might respond to past, present, and future climate change," Jamieson told UTIG. Researchers expressed hope that the discovery will lead to similar findings in other regions. "This landscape hanging out there in the middle of the basin is a little bit of an odd phenomenon," said Duncan Young, a research scientist for UTIG. "We're now working to answer why it was preserved and use that knowledge to find others." Combined, the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland contain two-thirds of Earth's fresh water, and they are melting at an astounding rate, according to NASA. The Antarctic ice sheet alone is shedding a jaw-dropping 150 billion tons of ice every single year. While studying the potential future impacts of rising global temperatures is important, it is just as important to prevent planet-warming pollution from entering the atmosphere in the first place. By taking steps like installing solar on your home, switching to an electric vehicle, or growing your own food in a home garden, you can do your part to help limit increasing global temperatures and sea-level rises. While these might seem like small things to do in the face of such a momentous challenge, if we multiply those actions by millions or even billions of people, we can make a real difference. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
For 9 Days, Earth Was Sending Out Mysterious Signals. Now We Know What They Were.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Strange signals coming from the Arctic in 2023 were assumed to be a seiche (trapped water with waves sloshing back and forth), but this was never confirmed. Previous instruments used to measure seismic weather phenomena were not able to pick up enough information, but NASA's SWOT satellite eventually found that the signal actually was from a seiche caused by a landslide. Reconstructions of what the weather was like during the days SWOT picked up the signal also show that it couldn't have been anything but a seiche. As fascinating as bizarre signals from other planets can be—teaching us about earthquakes on Mars or auroras in the skies of Jupiter—sometimes even weirder signals come from weather extremes happening right here on Earth. For nine days in 2023, an unknown seismic pulse was generated by the Earth every 90 seconds. It first appeared that September, vanished, and then returned in October. The signals began after a landslide triggered by a megatsunami in Dickson Fjord, Greenland, and was thought to have been produced by a seiche, or standing wave. This wave had probably been stirred up by the tsunami and then trapped by ice in the fjord—but there was no way to prove it. Satellite observations were able to document avalanches and the tsunamis they caused, and scientists collected further data in a research station. There was just one problem—the hypothesized seiche was eluding detection. It remained a mystery, even though studies at the time found seismic data that seemed to align with the sloshing motions of standing waves. So, researcher Thomas Monahan of Oxford University decided to take a closer look. Using data from the KaRIn (Ka-band Radar Interferometer) instrument on board NASA's Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite—an international collaboration capable of high-resolution measurements that extended into Dickson fjord—Monahan and his team finally found evidence for a seiche whose waves were slowly losing intensity. 'Based on the seismic attribution, and systematic ruling out of other dynamic phenomena, we conclude that the observed variability in the SWOT data is consistent with that of a slowly decaying seiche,' the team wrote in a study recently published in Nature Communications. Seiches can occur in lakes and other enclosed (or partially enclosed) bodies of water. The tsunami unleashed in Dickson Fjord had enough strength to leave powerful winds and sudden atmospheric pressure shifts in its wake, pushing water from one end of the enclosure to the other. The water then sloshed back and forth, oscillating for anywhere from hours to days after winds ceased. Tsunamis are often seismic phenomena, and the very long period (VLP) seismic signal that came from the fjord was the aftermath of a tsunamigenic landslide. Previous attempts at recording evidence for this particular seiche had been thwarted by the limitations of satellite altimeters, which did not pick up data during extended gaps between observations. They were also not able to record the differences in the height of waves beyond the area directly under the satellite. They were, however, able to get an especially accurate read on the water below. The landslides in Dickson Fjord happened right when SWOT was transitioning to its Science phase, during which it would orbit and survey most of the planet's surface from an altitude of 890 km (553 miles) for 21 days. This orbit was purposely out of sync with the Sun to lower the chances of misidentifying signal frequencies. The researchers went through the data from every pass the satellite made over the region for the weeks in September and October and used this data to create maps of the fjord, modeling it how would have behaved during different times after the landslide and the height differences between waves (which reached up to two meters, or about 6.5 feet). Reconstructions of weather conditions ruled out all other possible causes behind the signal, and convinced scientists that it could only have been caused by a seiche. 'This study shows how we can leverage the next generation of satellite earth observation technologies to study these processes,' Monahan said in a recent press release. 'SWOT is a game changer for studying oceanic processes in regions such as fjords which previous satellites struggled to see into.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Researchers make stunning discovery about the Arctic that could impact entire globe: 'Fixing these models is essential'
For decades, scientists have used complex computer models to predict how Earth's most vulnerable regions will respond to increasing global temperatures. But in the case of the Arctic — which is warming at least three times faster than the rest of the planet — those models have consistently fallen short. Now, researchers believe they've found one big overlooked reason: winter clouds. Scientists at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, have made a breakthrough that could reshape how we understand Arctic warming — and what it means for the rest of the planet. In a new study published in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research, researchers found that many leading climate simulations have a key flaw: they misrepresent Arctic cloud composition during winter, overestimating the ice and underestimating the liquid water content. That small detail? It has major consequences. In the Arctic's long, dark winters, clouds made of liquid trap heat more effectively — almost like a thermal blanket. And when those clouds are modeled incorrectly, it skews predictions about how quickly the Arctic is warming. "We found that the more liquid water these clouds contain, the better they are at trapping heat," explained co-author Momoka Nakanishi. This finding could help explain why the Arctic has been warming three to four times faster than the global average — faster than scientists had predicted. And while this might sound like a modeling issue with future implications, the reality is more urgent. The current models may be underestimating today's warming and overestimating tomorrow's. That's a dangerous mismatch — especially when polar warming influences everything from sea level rise to extreme weather patterns across the globe. And even if global warming were limited to the international target of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, another study warns that it may still be too late to prevent irreversible melting in the polar ice sheets. That would mean multimeter sea level rise — with long-term consequences for coastal communities worldwide. As cloud study co-author Takuro Michibata said, "Fixing these models is essential not just for the Arctic, but for understanding its impact on weather and climate change across the globe." Should the government ban gas stoves? Yes Only in new buildings Only in restaurants No way Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Meanwhile, researchers continue to refine our understanding of polar systems, while clean energy advocates and policymakers push for major upgrades that can make our homes and communities more resilient — including solar panels and battery storage systems that can keep the lights on during extreme weather — while reducing the sort of pollution that leads to increasing global temperatures. Installing solar in conjunction with a battery system can prepare your home for outages and drive your energy bill close to $0. EnergySage makes it easy to compare vetted local installers and save up to $10,000 on installation through tax incentives that may end after 2025. Even small changes matter. Reducing reliance on gas-powered appliances, supporting clean energy legislation, and staying informed are all actions that help — because understanding today's warming is key to preparing for tomorrow. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.