Seal pups dying en masse as ice floes melt

By Julio Godoy BERLIN, Apr 3 (Tierramérica) – Ringed seals in the Baltic Sea are finding fewer and fewer ice caves in which to raise their young. Rising global temperatures are the problem, and in turn are depleting the main food source of the giant polar bear, say scientists. … According to the latest report […]

Graph of the Day: Atmospheric Methane, 1985-2009

by Fred Pearce, environment correspondent for New Scientist “I AM shocked, truly shocked,” says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes […]

Polar bears 20% thinner, resorting to cannibalism

by Pierre-Henry Deshayes TROMSOE, Norway (AFP) – Potentially fatal to the polar bear, global warming has already left its mark on the species with smaller, less robust bears that are increasingly showing cannibalistic tendencies. Top experts who gathered this week in Tromsoe in northern Norway to discuss ways of protecting the species sounded alarm bells […]

Polar bears 'will not survive without urgent action'

By Daily Telegraph Reporter WWF, the conservation charity, said that the five countries which are home to the polar bear must commit to action on global warming to save the animal, which is reliant on the sea ice. Recent analysis by the US Geological Survey and World Conservation Union found that two-thirds of the 20,000 […]

Arctic summer sea ice could vanish by 2013

  By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region’s sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday. Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, […]

Greenland fishing villages abandoned as fish are driven to colder water

The demise of Greenland’s indigenous fishing villages should be a warning to us all, says a Kiwi who has seen the devastating impact of global warming. by STACEY WOOD – The Dominion Post Otago University student Susan Smirk spent five days in Greenland filming footage for a documentary about the impact of climate change, after […]

Sea level rise more than doubles since 1970s, polar ice caps melting faster

by Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor THE ice caps are melting so fast that the world’s oceans are rising more than twice as fast as they were in the 1970s, scientists have found. They have used satellites to track how the oceans are responding as billions of gallons of water reach them from melting ice sheets […]

Arctic warming pattern 'highly unusual'; Greenland ice sheet likely to melt

By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service   A major U.S. government report on Arctic climate, prepared with input from eight Canadian scientists, has concluded that the recent rapid warming of polar temperatures and shrinking of multi-year Arctic sea ice are "highly unusual compared to events from previous thousands of years." The findings, released on Friday, […]

Arctic tribe: Caribou numbers dropping fast, ice too thin to hunt on

By ARTHUR MAX, The Associated Press POZNAN, Poland — Chief Bill Erasmus of the  Dene nation in northern Canada brought a stark warning about the climate crisis: The once abundant herds of caribou are dwindling, rivers are running lower and the ice is too thin to hunt on. Erasmus raised his concerns recently on the […]

Starving polar bear population has tripled in 20 years

WARMER temperatures and earlier melting of sea ice are causing polar bears to go hungry. The number of undernourished bears has tripled in a 20-year period. Seth Cherry of the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues monitored the health of polar bears in the ice-covered Beaufort Sea region of the Arctic during April and May […]

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