Scientists

Scientists have reported some rare good news from the Arctic. As the climate changes and ice melts, at least in one region, polar bears are thriving: finding new ways to survive and even gaining weight.

“A fat bear is a healthy bear,” Jon Aars, senior scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute, told News themezone on Thursday.

He has been tracking polar bears in the remote Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard for more than 20 years. He led a team of researchers who meticulously tracked the weight and size of nearly 800 bears between 1992 and 2019.

They discovered that the polar giants were in good shape, able to survive and continue to raise new cubs.

“I was quite surprised,” Aars admitted, “because we’ve lost a lot of sea ice since I started.”

For years, scientists have raised the alarm that shrinking sea ice cover could put polar bears at risk as they use the ice as a platform to hunt seals.

“Some of us would predict that they should be in trouble by now,” Aars said.

But what his team has found suggests that bears are adapting to smaller patches of ice, and this may even help them hunt more efficiently as their prey, which also depends on ice, is concentrated in smaller areas.

“I think what this shows is that they need less sea ice than we thought,” Aars told News themezone.

His team’s research also found that melting ice is pushing polar bears to get creative on land, where they increasingly prey on other prey, such as reindeer and walrus.

“Some of them would be on the ground up to 90% of the time now, which is a lot,” he said.

While the bears’ prosperity is undeniably good news, Aars stressed that more research is needed to understand how polar bears in other parts of the Arctic are adapting to a warmer climate. And he cautioned that his team’s research does not attempt to predict how animals will handle the continued warming of the Arctic.

“The bears are still able to deal with the situation as it is today,” he said. “The bad news is that the predictions [are that] “We are going to lose sea ice quickly in Svalbard.”

In other words, Aars and many other scientists remain concerned that the Svalbard bears’ gains are temporary and could be reversed.