Why ice loss in the Arctic is threatening polar bear populations
Churchill, Canada — Here on the edge of the Arctic in northern Canada, the annual migration of polar bears draws tourists, photographers and scientists like Geoff York.
Buggies traverse the frozen terrain, bringing tourists closer to something truly wild. The polar bears pass through Churchill, Manitoba, hoping to catch a ride out of the tiny town on Hudson Bay's sea ice.
After a summer of fasting on land, the bears need to get back to their frozen home to hunt seals and bulk up.
"They're just dreaming of ice and being back out there," said York, senior director of research and policy with the conservation group Polar Bears International.
But this migration ritual is changing. The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the globe, according to a study published in 2022 in the journal Nature.
"The Arctic is one of the fastest warming regions in the planet," said Flavio Lehner, chief climate scientist for Polar Bears International and assistant professor at Cornell University, who explains that it's melting the sea ice that bears depend on.
"It's important, because it's a complete transformation of the ecosystem," Lehner said.
The Western Hudson Bay polar bears are off the ice for a month longer than their parents and grandparents. That hurts their hunting and ability to have healthy cubs that make it to adulthood.
It's a change that has cut this population by up to half in 40 years, according to Polar Bears International.
"It's actually hard to find other places, maybe other than places maybe that have been deforested in the Amazon, where you see such a stark change," Lehner said.
And what happens in the Arctic trickles down to all of us.
"If the sea ice disappears, the Arctic will warm faster and the planet will warm faster," Lehner said.
That ice can be thought of like the Earth's air conditioner. It reflects light and heat away from our waters. Without it, the sun is absorbed and warms the oceans.
Scientists say to slow the melting, we need to significantly cut emissions from fossil fuels.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Astronomers left puzzled by high-altitude clouds forming on young planet
Should humans ever venture to a particular planet that circles a sun-like star in the constellation of the fly, they would do well to keep an eye on the weather. The thick slabs of cloud that blot the planet's skies are mostly made from mineral dust, but astronomers suspect there may be iron in them, too, which would rain down on the world below when the clouds break. Astronomers spotted the high-altitude clouds when they trained the James Webb space telescope (JWST) on the young star system, which lies 307 light years away in the deep southern sky. The star, YSES-1, is a newbie by cosmic standards, a mere 1m years old compared with the 4.6bn-year-old sun. The star is circled by two gas giants, both still forming and both larger than Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system. Related: Astronomers find signal that gives 'unexpected' insight into early universe Dr Kielan Hoch, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said the planetary system's youth made it a prime target for astronomers to learn more about the early evolution of planets around faraway stars. 'There's a small handful of multiplanet systems that have been directly imaged,' Hoch said. 'And they are a unique laboratory to test planet formation theories as they formed in the same environment.' 'Both planets are still forming, which is why they are still bright enough for us to detect,' she added. 'The light we are seeing is from their formation as they begin to shrink and condense.' When the team began their observations they were surprised to find both planets in the telescope's field of view, giving them information on two worlds for the price of one. The outer planet, YSES-1c, is the smaller of the two worlds, and about six times the mass of Jupiter. The telescope revealed high-altitude clouds in the planet's atmosphere, but instead of being made from water vapour as on Earth, the clouds consist of magnesium silicate dust grains and perhaps some iron. 'The iron would indeed precipitate out,' Hoch said. The astronomers described the observations as the first direct detection of such clouds on a planet circling a sun-like star. Further data revealed a disc of material made up of trillions of tonnes of dust particles around the larger inner world, YSES-1b, about 14 times the mass of Jupiter. The findings were published in Nature. Hoch said the disc around the inner planet was a 'puzzle for formation theories' since both planets must have formed in the same environment. 'Why did YSES-1b hold on to material around it while YSES-1c did not?' she said. An added mystery is why a 16m-year-old planet still has a disk of material swirling around it. Astronomers' theories of planet formation suggest that any encircling dust should have settled after the first 5m years. 'We wouldn't expect the planets to look so different from one another if they formed in the same protoplanetary disk,' Hoch said. 'JWST is providing an immense amount of data to continue to refine models and improve our understanding.' The $10bn telescope has transformed astronomy since it launched in December 2021 from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. The flagship mission has peered back to the first galaxies that lit up the cosmos, spied strange new worlds, and witnessed black holes colliding. It has even spotted tantalising, if controversial, hints of life beyond Earth.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Penguin population decline may be worse than "worst-case projections"
Emperor penguin populations in Antartica may be declining faster than the most pessimistic predictions, scientists said after analyzing satellite images of a key part of the continent. The images, spanning from 2009 to 2024, suggest a decline of 22% in the Antarctic Peninsula, Weddell Sea and Bellingshausen Sea, according to researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and University of Southampton, who published their study in Nature on Tuesday. The 16 emperor penguin colonies in that part of Antartica represent a third of the global population. The estimated decline compares to an earlier estimate of a 9.5% reduction across Antarctica as a whole between 2009 and 2018. The researchers now have to see if their assessment in that region of Antartica is true for the rest of the continent. "There's quite a bit of uncertainty in this type of work and what we've seen in this new count isn't necessarily symbolic of the rest of the continent," Dr. Peter Fretwell, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. "But if it is — that's worrying because the decline is worse than the worst-case projections we have for emperors this century." While further analysis is needed, Fretwell told Agence France-Presse the colonies studied were considered representative. Researchers know that climate change is driving the losses, but the speed of the declines is a particular cause for alarm. Warming is thinning and destabilizing the ice under the penguins' feet in their breeding grounds. In recent years some colonies have lost all their chicks because the ice has given way beneath them, plunging hatchlings into the sea before they were old enough to cope with the freezing ocean. Fretwell said the new research suggests penguin numbers have been declining since the monitoring began in 2009. That is even before global warming was having a major impact on the sea ice, which forms over open water adjacent to land in the region. But he said the culprit is still likely to be climate change, with warming driving other challenges for the penguins, such as higher rainfall or increasing encroachment from predators. "Emperor penguins are probably the most clear-cut example of where climate change is really showing its effect," Fretwell said. "There's no fishing. There's no habitat destruction. There's no pollution which is causing their populations to decline. It's just the temperatures in the ice on which they breed and live, and that's really climate change." Emperor penguins number about a quarter of a million breeding pairs, all in Antarctica, according to a 2020 study. A baby emperor penguin emerges from an egg kept warm in winter by a male, while the female in a breeding pair embarks on a two-month fishing expedition. When she returns to the colony, she feeds the hatchling by regurgitating and then both parents take turns to forage. To survive on their own, chicks must develop waterproof feathers, a process that typically starts in mid-December. The new research uses high resolution satellite imagery during the months of October and November, before the region is plunged into winter darkness. Fretwell said future research could use other types of satellite monitoring, like radar or thermal imaging, to capture populations in the darker months, as well as expand to the other colonies. He said there is hope that the penguins may go further south to colder regions in the future but added that it is not clear "how long they're going to last out there." Computer models have projected that the species will be near extinction by the end of the century if humans do not slash their planet-heating emissions. The latest study suggests the picture could be even worse. "We may have to rethink those models now with this new data," said Fretwell. But he stressed there was still time to reduce the threat to the penguins. "We've got this really depressing picture of climate change and falling populations even faster than we thought but it's not too late," he said. "We're probably going to lose a lot of emperor penguins along the way, but if people do change, and if we do reduce or turn around our climate emissions, then then we will save the emperor penguin." Australian reporter covering Los Angeles protests shot with rubber bullet by police officer LAPD chief speaks out about deployment of military forces to anti-ICE protests Can Trump deploy National Guard without governor's approval?
Yahoo
8 hours 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.
