Three adult polar bears travel across sea ice in eastern Greenland. Environments in the Far North that would have stayed well below freezing now experience freeze-thaw cycles and wet snow due to a warming climate.
As the Arctic warms, some polar bears are being injured by painful ice buildup on their paws: study | CBC News LoadedResearchers observing polar bears in two different populations in northern Canada and Greenland found that some of the bears were experiencing hair loss, gashes and ice buildup on their paws that, in some cases, seriously affected their mobility.Three adult polar bears travel across sea ice in eastern Greenland.
The observations were made by researchers between 2012 and 2022 while studying a population of bears in the Kane Basin, which lies between Nunavut and Greenland, and another population in East Greenland. Their findings were published last week in the scientific journal Ecology.Among the Kane Basin bears, 31 of the 61 bears they observed had injuries related to ice buildup, including cuts, scars and hairless patches created when hair would get wet, refreeze and be torn off.
However, she said, it is the first time these types of injuries have been reported among these two polar bear populations. If a polar bear has this kind of injury in springtime, it can be "really quite catastrophic" to their chances of survival, he said. "In the springtime, that's when you've got to be fattening up. And if you can't move and hunt effectively, that's going to have negative impacts."Changing temperatures in the Arctic are one of the big factors that may be contributing to these injuries, researchers said.
A third scenario is that these two bear populations are uniquely susceptible to ice buildup because of where they live.
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