Polar bears and local weather change: New analysis in Norway has scientists baffled

[ad_1] Polar bears turned the poster youngster for the peril of local weather change for apparent causes: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels heat the planet, the ice where these bears live is melting .

For greater than three a long time, scientists have been warning that local weather change may drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the general public psyche, maybe greater than another in regards to the scourge of world warming.

Polar bears, a mascot for the impacts of local weather change, are threatened by melting sea ice. These iconic Arctic predators depend upon seals, however they will’t simply hunt them and not using a platform of ice. A brand new examine complicates the story, discovering that polar bears in Svalbard, Norway, are wholesome, regardless that the area is shedding sea ice sooner than another polar bear habitat. Scientists concerned within the examine suggest that Svalbard’s bears are adapting their weight-reduction plan — with encouraging outcomes. However as scientists are persevering with to study, the truth for these iconic bears is extra sophisticated.

In 2022, scientists published a study displaying that polar bears in southeastern Greenland had been able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt , sheltering them from a few of the impacts of warming. And a examine published late last year revealed some modifications in polar bear DNA that will help them adapt to hotter weather .

Now, <a href="https://nlcontent.springernature.com/d-redirect/TIDP4723349X59C114AE0A5946378022EB393E01B08CYI4/?data=Y%2fEoBuyuOiGbwlHZFeIhh2maFh3evqEUonAeq7T5wSDVLnPcDhjshfzZxE6hiGr1%2fDICswTg3t6TyuKqz3rB1MF%2bEd05%2fuNTVMYkTzCeSR1BLgt5zUr7rsl2w%2fCEIzo%2fKOkQfet80vQ3FqNZdXgSt%2beLUzV1eMuwfOqw83TKg4r9KWnV4kAifY4ssrHpwDKdPMfF435SCdjwEAEYN53YMDKrSPkvJyjmkwMUQSIF53Ar%2biCP1QsaaY%2boFBYUkPve5roc7yqK9inwj4PrZWVc03rmKfoGrlM72daccTDiuo%2btjxsJhKqCHtVbakxtg%2fecq4VgAvh%2f3%2fdKTXk6zINi9aC3or1cLAdA5Vf05tK4V6WJhJNiotzbmr8PTV%2biIjiq">research within the journal Scientific Reviews provides one more wrinkle of hope for the species. The examine, an evaluation of a whole bunch of polar bears within the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, discovered that declining sea ice isn't inflicting polar bears to starve. They really appeared more healthy within the final twenty years of the evaluation, from 2000 to 2019. The general inhabitants, in the meantime, is both secure or rising, based on Jon Aars, the examine’s lead creator and a scientist on the Norwegian Polar Institute.

“I used to be stunned,” Aars instructed Vox from Svalbard. “I'd have predicted that physique situation would decline. We see the other.”

The brand new examine makes clear that, in different areas, the lack of sea ice from warming is certainly linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, for instance, researchers have tied melting ice to decrease bear survival and a shortage of food , discovering that the inhabitants has roughly halved because the Eighties. Local weather change stays the biggest menace to those animals.

But, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the globe, and so they all behave barely in a different way. Warming isn't uniformly killing them.

Maybe, then, polar bears aren’t the most effective mascot for the local weather disaster — some extent some advocates have been making for a while — particularly when there are numerous different species imperiled by rising temperatures.

What this new examine says about polar bears

Polar bears want fats to outlive the cruel Arctic chilly; that’s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, in the meantime, want ice to relaxation and delivery pups. With out that ice, polar bears have a tough time discovering and catching them.

Because the late Seventies, the Arctic — the northernmost area of the planet, together with elements of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia — has lost greater than 27,000 sq. miles of summer season ice. That’s an space bigger than the state of West Virginia. Some estimates counsel that the area might be ice-free by the center of the century, even beneath optimistic emissions situations.

That melting ice is what’s harming polar bear populations in Canada’s Hudson Bay ; the Beaufort Sea , situated north of Alaska and the Yukon; and Baffin Bay in Greenland. And it’s why they’re listed as threatened beneath the US Endangered Species Act and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources , a world authority on endangered species.

However the story in Svalbard — an icy archipelago within the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia — is totally different.

Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted a whole bunch of polar bears from helicopters and measured their our bodies. Then they in contrast these measurements to sea ice situations, such because the variety of ice-free days, and different local weather variables.

<img alt="Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/NP077454.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers on the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the brand new examine, measure a polar bear in Svalbard. Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute

Remarkably, the variety of days with no ice within the area elevated by roughly 100 throughout that interval. And but, because the authors discovered, the physique situation of each female and male polar bears — i.e., how fats and wholesome they're — elevated from 2000 onward. Feminine bears had been really in worse situation when the ocean ice lasted longer.

Usually, the message about polar bears is “100% doom,” mentioned Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher on the College of Washington, who was not concerned within the examine. “However that’s not true,” Laidre instructed me. “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] provides to the variability story.”

How are these bears surviving?

If polar bears in Svalbard are wholesome, meaning they’re discovering meals. So what are they consuming?

One risk, mentioned Aars, the lead creator, is that there could also be increased densities of ringed seals, their major meals supply, in years with much less ice, in order that they’re simpler to catch. Even when polar bears have much less time to catch the seals — as a result of there are fewer days with ice — they will placed on a great deal of weight shortly and depend on that for months.

The bears can also be consuming different animals on land that don’t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago are increasing , for instance, and Aars says he’s seen bears eat them. Walrus populations are increasing , too. Though polar bears can’t simply kill a walrus, they will scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from different causes.

“Bears in Svalbard are probably altering their weight-reduction plan, and which may account for the rise in physique situation,” mentioned John Iacozza, a senior teacher and polar bear skilled on the College of Manitoba. That’s a luxurious that polar bears elsewhere may not have. “You wouldn’t see the identical impact taking place in Western Hudson Bay, simply because the provision of different species is much less,” mentioned Iacozza, who was not concerned within the new analysis.

Whereas the Svalbard bears is likely to be nice for now, researchers nonetheless fear in regards to the long-term impacts of warming within the area. “We do suppose there’s a threshold,” Aars instructed me. “The tough half is that we don’t know what it's.”

Does the local weather motion want a brand new mascot?

No different animal has been so closely tied to climate change because the polar bear. It was on the cover of TIME’s 2006 world warming challenge. It was featured in Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Reality , which premiered the identical 12 months . It was utilized in funding campaigns for environmental teams. (One 12 months, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a buddy who went as a melting ice cap.)

The bear’s symbolism is rooted in good science. These early research had been in locations like Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, the place these Arctic apex predators had been clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media shops amplified essentially the most sensational conclusions — and so they caught.

That’s partly as a result of the message is easy, Laidre mentioned: Polar bears want ice, and warming is making it disappear. “The connection between [climate and] an animal that wants a platform to eat is straightforward to wrap your mind round,” she mentioned.

Even earlier than these more moderen research, the local weather motion had moved away from utilizing polar bears as a mascot for advocacy, journalist Kate Yoder wrote on the environmental information website Grist. Local weather advocates apprehensive that spotlighting the bears made world warming seem to be a faraway downside — one for animals in distant areas, not a disaster for species and people in all places, proper now. As we speak, messaging tends to deal with the very actual human affect and the feelings that include it: houses engulfed in flames or swept away by floods, for instance, or excessive hurricanes barreling in direction of the coast.

From a scientific perspective, the polar bear nonetheless works as a logo for the local weather disaster, Iacozza mentioned; these animals nonetheless want ice, in order that they’re nonetheless beneath siege from warming.

But when advocates did need a new mascot, there’d be a protracted record of different animals to select from. All types of corals, for instance, are getting cooked by marine warmth waves. Uncommon Hawaiian birds referred to as honeycreepers are going extinct from avian malaria , which mosquitoes are spreading additional uphill because the islands heat.

Different Arctic animals are threatened, too, Aars mentioned, together with ringed seals. “Lots of these are extra in danger than polar bears,” he instructed me. “There are additionally modifications in Svalbard, within the sea, which can be way more profound than what we see on land with polar bears. However individuals don’t see it, or individuals don’t care.”

Finally, it’s simple for individuals to care about polar bears. They’re huge, they’re fluffy, and so they’re distinctive. So maybe, as an alternative of ditching them as a mascot for warming, it’d be higher to acknowledge that the story is extra sophisticated than it’s typically introduced. Local weather change impacts the pure world in a different way elsewhere.