Polar bears are doubly endangered

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For years, the polar bear on the thinning ice floe has been the motive for everyone around the world to warn about the consequences of climate change. By now, humanity has fundamentally understood that a changing climate with rising temperatures and more frequent and severe extreme weather events is not just affecting predators in the Arctic. Other images have long served as symbols of the climate crisis, such as those of the devastating floods in Germany’s Ahr Valley in 2021 or the equally deadly bushfires in Australia.

The climate crisis has long been felt where people live. Or, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres metaphorically put it when presenting the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report, “Humanity is on thin ice – and this ice is melting fast.”

At the same time, the situation of the white giants has not necessarily improved. Global warming is forcing them to new regions and diets, and researchers are seeing alarming signs that chemicals found deep in the ice may be reaching the animals as well. So it’s time to ask: how is he, the polar bear?

Polar bear is a “majestic icon”

There is no general answer to this question. “It depends a lot on where you look,” says leading Norwegian polar bear researcher Jon Aars. “On Spitsbergen, for example, they are still doing fine. We see a lot of different effects on what they do and where they are, but not that their population is declining or that they can’t reproduce.”

Elsewhere, the situation is more difficult, says the researcher from the Norwegian Polar Institute. “They’re faring much worse elsewhere in the Arctic, and we know that’s because of climate change, a warmer climate and less sea ice.” The bears suffer the most in more southern parts of the Arctic, such as Canada’s Hudson Bay, as well as north of Alaska in the Beaufort Sea, where poor ice conditions have plagued them for years.

However, there is hardly any other place in the world that is as closely associated with polar bears as Spitsbergen. Today, according to Aars, an estimated 250 individuals live around and on the North Norwegian archipelago, and about 3,000 in the entire Barents Sea area, which extends to Russia. In Spitsbergen’s main town, Longyearbyen, almost everything is advertised with the likeness of the “King of the Arctic”, from the local beer to the local supermarket.

At the same time he is one of the major driving forces behind tourism on Spitsbergen, meeting them from a safe distance of one or two kilometers is an unforgettable experience. “He is a majestic icon,” said Visit Svalbard Tourism Director Ronny Brunvoll.

The time windows for seal hunting are getting shorter and shorter

At the same time, no secret is made of the danger posed by the predator. In the village, reverent tales are told of Frost, the female polar bear, who has repeatedly invaded human dwellings in recent years and whose cubs are said to have long imitated her behavior. Only six fatal attacks have been recorded since polar bear hunting was banned on Svalbard 50 years ago, the latest being at a campsite near the airport in the summer of 2020 – by a cub from Frost.

In general, the polar bear population in the Arctic is estimated to be about 26,000 individuals. Due to increasing climate change, the region is warming up much faster than other parts of the world, which is especially noticeable on Spitsbergen: where there was once freezing cold with temperatures well into the double-digit minus, the thermometer often only drops to about 0 degrees, as residents from Report Longyearbyen. “It’s one of the regions in the world where you can really see the warming of the climate,” says polar researcher Bjørn Munro Jenssen from the University Center of Spitsbergen (UNIS).

This also has consequences for the situation of the polar bears, explains researcher Aars: “We see that many of the bears are now much further north – simply because they spend a lot of time on the sea ice and the ice covers a large part of the year 200, 300 kilometers further north than normal.” The sea ice is their main accomplice in the seal hunt. “They like ice cream, but don’t want too much of it either,” says Aars. This means that if the ice cover is too thick, they cannot reach their prey in the water – if it is too thin, it will not give them enough support.

Seal hunting time is also getting shorter for the bears, Aars said. On Spitsbergen you also see that they hunted reindeer and looted bird nests much more often than before.

“Eternal chemicals” a problem for animals

According to researchers, another problem can be added to the sea ice melting problem: An international team led by environmental chemist William Hartz (also UNIS) has found 26 different PFAS compounds in an ice core in a remote part of Spitsbergen called Lomonosovfonna – the highest ice sheet found in the archipelago. These are chemical substances that are used, for example, to make pans or jackets dirt and water repellent.

Their problem: they don’t just disappear from the environment, which is why they are often called “forever chemicals”. They can also be harmful to health and the environment, which is why the German government is currently working with other European countries to ban most of these substances. This is being discussed in the EU.

What poses a risk to human health also poses a risk to animal welfare. The concern is that atmospherically transported PFAS materials will travel from distant regions of America, Europe and Asia to arctic glaciers and from there to the sea , as Jenssen explained. They could then eventually make up the entire food chain – from plankton to fish and seals to that polar bear.

This could pose a double problem for the animals, as his UNIS colleague Hartz said. “Polar bears are exposed to toxic man-made chemicals while also dealing with changing habitats, reduced sea ice and changing hunting grounds,” he said. The PFAS levels in the polar bears on Svalbard are similar to those in the blood of people living near chemical plants in China, Hartz said. “It’s pretty alarming.”

Polar bears could move further north

Polar bear researcher Aars is also concerned about the developments of PFAS. “We know they have an effect on animals, but we don’t know much yet about how bad it is. It’s not good, but we don’t know how bad it is,” he said.

Meanwhile, Aars expects polar bears to move further north as sea ice diminishes. “These are the areas where we might still have polar bears in 50, 100 years and where they’re doing well because there’s still ice,” he said. “The predictions are that they may disappear from many other areas where there will be no more sea ice.”

Source: Blick