Climate change could make giving birth riskier for polar bears in northern Alaska.
thought to be starving due to sea ice declines have stirred pity among scientists and the public.
Mother polar bears need snow at least 2 meters deep to dig their dens, and snow generally doesn’t reach those depths in the Arctic except in the lee of ridges or other structures that block the wind, said Liu. In, Liston and his colleagues modeled how snow would have fallen and been blown across a detailed reconstruction of the study area landscape from 1995 through 2012.
Declining snow levels could also be disastrous for ringed seals, the polar bears’ primary prey, noted Stirling and Amstrup. Ringed seals carve out dens on the surface of the ice beneath a layer of snow. Without the snow, the seal pups are vulnerable to cold and predators. In some parts of the Arctic, polar bear populations appear more stable, and the effects of climate change are taking hold more slowly. But, said Amstrup, there is no reason to think that the bears in northern Alaska will be the only ones running out of places to dig dens.
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